Fact and Fiction on Foreign Aid
Buttinger, Joseph
The name of Joseph Buttinger first became familiar to the American political public several years ago, when he published his book In the Twilight of Socialism. Partly a memoir of his experience...
...All of this would be true even if we achieved perfect agreement, among ourselves and with the governments we aid, about the kind of projects, both in regard to purpose and size, that promise the best results...
...American aid for Indonesia, the largest and most troubled country of Southeast Asia, amounts to an annual gift of less than ten cents for every one of its eighty million inhabitants, a sum hardly sufficient (if money were a decisive factor) to influence a wavering Indonesian in making a choice between Communism and the democratic West...
...The territory cf Finian's duel with the devil is a perfect political and administrative desert, occupied by a population unengaged in any form of indigenous political life, and apparently only waiting to be either enslaved by Russian-directed Communists or saved by a "practical, tough-minded and thoughtful" fellow from Worcester, Mass...
...Washington has so far been unable to comply with Saigon's request...
...Since nobody wants to be "ruined," the only truly effective method of defeating Communism is to reveal to the people the Communists' real aim...
...Even after reading it, I still believe that permanent criticism in public discussion of our aid programs and administrations is indispensable for their improvement...
...These fifteen pages, the authors reiterate, were written in order to prove that what they present in the form of fiction is not "wholly imaginary" but "based on fact...
...Which means that the road transport scheme has to fail...
...Can he be held responsible for difficulties that are as much part of the growingup processes of a recently independent and sorely troubled nation as they are of the delicate problems involving two national sovereignties...
...It is for this reason that I refer the reader who still believes that The Ugly American is "squarely based on fact" to page 28, where Lederer and Burdick say that "we do not need the horde of 1,500,000 Americans —mostly amateurs—who are now working for the United States overseas...
...After years of a daily call to ever inglorious action, with difficulties of private adjustment that not everybody bears equally well, there are bound to be many from whom all vitality has departed, and whose former zeal has been defeated by the accumulative boredom of necessary bureaucratic routine...
...For the true writer of fiction who has something more important to say than has the mere reporter of facts, no conflict exists between fact and fiction...
...He had never failed...
...They should, of course, study, as Finian did, "the culture, the history, and anthropology of the country" they choose to work in, and preferably also the writings of Lenin, Stalin, Engels and Marx...
...It seems that in 1958 alone the army engineers "began projects calling for construction of more than 154 miles of road, 5 major bridges and 98 minor bridges and 2 airfields...
...When we suggested that we might be spreading ourselves a little thin, one said: 'But it's much better than it was—we did have 240,'" ing in this meticulous description of technical and administrative achievements...
...whatever meaning and quality they possess is as inseparable from their peculiar context of human in telligence and passion as it is from time and place...
...The people engaged in them will live better and happier lives, but "economic independence" for Vietnam requires more...
...The very idea that a Western Catholic should feel qualified to teach the people of Buddhist Burma what to think and do about Communism is to me as ridiculous as it must be insulting to the many Burmese whose successful struggle against Communism is the reason why an American priest can today go to Burma at all...
...Furthermore, what is true about our discussions on foreign policy in general is doubly true for our national disputes about both the theory and the practice of foreign aid: they proceed within an ever widening realm of misgivings, misgivings that no official assurances at home or governmental expressions of gratitude abroad are able to dispel...
...If I were to write further on this subject, I would in all likelihood produce a highly critical survey and not a eulogy...
...There they give what they consider to be a true picture of our diplomatic and foreign aid activities in Southeast Asia, without, however, explaining what makes them believe that they, as authors of a book on contemporary politics can get away with putting fiction in place of fact...
...India will achieve the basic objective of raising her living standard only through a rapid and well-planned industrialization...
...This makes it the more remarkable that of the sixty-five projects in Vietnam described on pp...
...According to this diagnosis, we would no longer be troubled by the Philippines' claim of about $900 million (including claims for war damages), by her requests for development loans (which the Garcia regime rightly feels are unduly delayed in Washington), by her attempts to charge higher import taxes on American goods and by the dispute over a revision of the United States bases agreement and criminal jurisdiction in cases involving American military personnel—if only we sent the right kind of ambassador to Manila and if this ambassador surrounded himself with the right kind of Tagalog-speaking assistants...
...It is among these readers that I would like to achieve a few conversions to my views...
...Although no one will ever be able to determine accurately the volume of these purchases—it seems that thousands, not just hundreds of copies were thus sold—it was big enough to betray an organized effort and at the same time to tip the delicate balance, so characteristic for the American book market, between obscurity and fame...
...11 Even a cursory examination of the Ellender report will disabuse anyone who suspects that this judgment might be too harsh...
...The French lost in Indochina because they neglected to read the books the Communists themselves had written about their plans and tactical methods for winning wars, books from which we and the French could have learned, had we only read them, how to defeat the Communist guerillas...
...I do not know what `village-size papermaking plants" are, and I doubt very much that the creation of small industries falls under the category of small and "almost costless" aid projects...
...But if the acceptance by others of our political ideas, the imitation of our institutions, and the adherence to our social and economic creeds are regarded as the main criteria of our diplomatic success, we had better get ready for an unending series of new "American failures"—and also for a cavalcade of new books in which new experts denounce and bemoan every one of our new "losses" even if what we have lost has never really belonged to us...
...They think the son of a bitch is trying to be evasive.' " 'A simple question, Captain Boning,' Asch said crisply...
...The attempt by the Communists to suppress the paper only raised the demand for it "and copies became prized...
...Its main causes lie in India...
...The facts and figures covering all American economic and technical assistance projects undertaken in these countries before the end of fiscal year 1956/57 can be looked up in the Ellender report, pp...
...mining, but in these fields too, the number of small projects is remarkably large...
...The great number of people whom genuine despair keeps driving into the ranks of the indifferent or cynical is no proof against this contention...
...The Communists tried to kill the men who made it, but "for the first time" their "espionage failed," and "the Communists slowly became buffoons in the eyes of the local Burmese...
...In fact, the Iranians have recently quite on their own started another one of these "useless" dams (this time without being prodded by forwardlooking American aid officials), for the simple reason that dams are as vital for Iran's economic development as railroads and steelmills were for the economic growth of the United States...
...by producing accurate figures and reliable dates, by citing specific projects and correct names of places, by relating verifiable events, and by using many other relevant data, all of which are available to anyone who is willing to work through the growing bulk of official and private publications on the subject...
...It is not possible to understand what is in the minds of other people without understanding their language, and without understanding their language it is impossible to be sure that they understand what is in our minds...
...The trouble with most moralists, hoi ever, is that they are likely to condemn others, friends as well as mnemies, more vigorously than themselves...
...The Communist plan to destroy The Communist Farmer went wrong because of Toki...
...The careful reader of the Ellender report will notice that we have in Vietnam an "excessive" number of costly projects for health and education...
...It was French policy, the attempt to preserve French colonial rule, not ignorance of Mao Tse-tung's writings, which made it impossible to defeat the Vietminh...
...So the debate will continue, and will probably increase in bitterness, to the dismay of the many Americans for whom no political difficulty is without its just and workable solution, provided we practice common sense and apply a minimum of good will...
...RECENT REPORTS have removed all doubts as to the reality and the scope of the aid North Vietnam is receiving from Russia and Communist China...
...MUCH HAS BEEN SAID lately about the extent to which a strictly military approach impairs our effectiveness in foreign affairs...
...Schary, for instance, when dramatizing a period in the public and family life of Roosevelt, changed no names, made Roosevelt not a politician of Australia or of some imaginary country, did not distort the setting of significant or even trivial and often quite delicate facts that constituted his hero's environment, and still was able to give us more than just a catalogue of accurately connected facts...
...This "novel" about American diplomacy and foreign aid in Southeast Asia has now been on the bestseller lists for almost seven months, basking in the flattering vicinity of Lolita and Doctor Zhivago...
...When the funds were exhausted long before the project was completed, the Export-Import Bank (whose policy critics of the aid administration habitually praise) granted a $40,000,000 loan, while several additional millions were spent by our aid mission to Afghanistan to remedy some of the project's most serious faults...
...Most newspapers and magazines stress more and more the negative side in discussing our foreign aid...
...Even the most critical reviews I have read contain references to the authors' good intentions that amount to a bashful recommendation for their book...
...Let us by all means continue the many small projects we have been supporting in India as elsewhere in Asia ever since this program began...
...For years," Lederer and Burdick write in the Factual Epilogue, "both we and our allies have put in much expensive effort trying to ferret out in advance the Communist plan for both tactical maneuvers and great conquests...
...See also the reporton the hearings of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives of May 7 and 8, 1958...
...The Helmand Valley project is now widely regarded as a fail-construction, although a minority of experts still believe that the future may yet justify its enormous cost...
...With the story of Tom Knox, the authors explain, "we tried to point out the fact that we spend billions on the wrong aid projects while overlooking the almost costless and far more helpful ones...
...I will consider myself as having been successful if I can satisfy the reader that the following statements are true: Lederer and Burdick are shockingly ignorant of the facts essential for a fair presentation of their subject...
...Before I conclude this confrontation of some real sources on foreign aid with The Ugly American's imaginary facts and figures, I would like to say a few words in defense of the people on whom Lederer and Burdick put the burden of guilt for our political "failures" in Southeast Asia...
...But there are also other men who have grown keener, wiser, and more competent in years of bitter struggle unsung by our journalists and writers...
...Let us not forget that most of our Southeast Asian programs of foreign aid are less than eight years old...
...This being a typical economic de...
...However, there is an important point to be made here...
...The facts with which they fill their book, because they concern on the whole a country that exists only in their imagination, are as unreal as only a "fact" outside the realm of actual life can be...
...and he warned that the Garcia regime was fully capable of severing ties with the United States and of taking an independent, neutralist attitude in the East-West struggle...
...ASSUMING THAT LEDERER AND BURDICK were to be consulted on the present strained United States-Philippines relations, their diagnosis, if they take seriously what they preach, would have to be that there must be something wrong with our ambassador to Manila...
...I find good reason to rejoice over the fact that the dollars that go to Indochina are no longer spent on French airplanes and tanks but are now used to increase the number of Vietnamese doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, teachers, and schools...
...The plant was equipped with machinery supplied by the Soviet Union under an aid agreement with Communist North Vietnam...
...India failed to take this historic step because Captain Boning, the military specialist of the American delegation, was not on his toes...
...The first of these conditions is that we realize that aid to other nations is not just a temporary device, or merely a weapon in the "cold war" that can be abandoned as soon as relations between East and West improve...
...They were not at all after the aims normally pursued with works of fiction...
...Most reviewers proceeded like Maya Pines, who started out by saying that the book was written with the "subtlety of a sledge hammer," but then lacked both the heart and the sagacity to condemn it on any other score...
...but if Lederer's and Burdick's small and "almost costless" projects are all the aid India can expect from the West, she will have no choice but to seek more and more Soviet economic assistance, which can only increase the danger, now still very small, that forced by circumstances India will adopt the drastic Communist methods to speed up her economic development and thus become submerged in the Communist system...
...and we raised the quality of dried, stroked and salted fish...
...At the time of Senator Ellender's last visit, it had also accumulated some $50 million from sales of surplus agricultural products received under Public Law 480...
...and they promise that these pages contain not only their reasons for writing The Ugly American but also the sources from which their complaints and accusations are derived...
...This is the opinion of a man whose main concern in writing his report was to show that a business-like approach to the problems of foreign aid is quite compatible with the political aims we are trying to pursue in Southeast Asia.19 III As to South Vietnam, a country about which our loquacious authors are remarkably reticent, no lengthy argument is needed to show that here is a case in which not a single one of The Ugly American's heedless generalizations applies...
...nor can they expect to win general popular support for our assistance programs to nations whose regimes resemble our democracy as the sword resembles the pen...
...There is no doubt in Johnson's mind that the "proper help" requires, in addition to the many small projects we operate in Thailand, many more big ones...
...Cunningly," Lederer and Burdick make Vinich say exactly what you would expect them to believe is being said by a leading Communist in a secret meeting...
...Far from helping Americans to overcome their perplexity and irresolution in regard to the problems of foreign aid, The Ugly American only adds to the existing confusion and has in fact already strengthened the pernicious idea that we might as well abandon a political battlefield on which it is so difficult for us to excel...
...The road forms a main link in the vital transportation route from the port of Bangkok to landlocked Laos...
...But there can be no doubt that the Helmand Valley project was poorly prepared: its costs were vastly underestimated, the land to be irrigated turned out to be largely unsuitable for decent crops, the population of these regions is apparently unwilling to give up their ancient nomadic way of life...
...I am glad to report that by the time Finian had licked Communism in northern Burma "the pain in his bowels had finally disappeared...
...the over-all Communist operation plan contained in The Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung...
...I was not quite sure why I found it so distasteful to hear Finian say that "he had to find at least one native Catholic who was courageous," until an Asian friend of mine told me this remark obviously implies that a courageous man is the hardest thing to find in the East...
...31), p. 390...
...The Vietnamese think that about 75% of the army engineers are engaged in a type of military work that contributes directly to the economic development of Vietnam...
...WHAT PURPOSE did the promoters of The Ugly American have in mind...
...In Father Finian, who is as unconvincing an invention as Salomon Asch, the sin of moral and intellectual conceit in politics takes on a most obnoxious form...
...The other two—Laos and Indonesia—I propose to examine because Lederer and Burdick mention them as examples of countries were Communism is being helped by wrong projects of American aid...
...It would be as unfair to ask the authors to give us their "sources" for these characters as it is unseemly for them to indicate that they possess them but do not wish to reveal them...
...An advertisement in the New York Times of January 23 (and on a few subsequent dates) indicates that even months after publication this kind of promotion was considered necessary for The Ugly American's success...
...A quota tion from the New York Times, and an excerpt from a speech by Sec retary of State Dulles are about all that could be called sources...
...How can anyone read without blushing for the authors (one of whom calls himself a political scientist), "that communism was the face of the devil, altered slyly and shrewdly, but still the devil's face, put on earth to test again the morality of men...
...Which means that the mulberry and rice crops have to fail here...
...In fact, for the benefit of readers who believe that these authors have taught them something about the kind of aid America is giving to the countries of Southeast Asia, I am going to make the question of small and big projects the main point of my demonstration that The Ugly American is untrue to fact...
...These attitudes help to explain the two astonishing extremes that our vacillating foreign policy is capable of reaching...
...The Russians, whom Lederer and Burdick never tire of holding up to us as shining examples, certainly act quite contrary to The Ugly American's dogmatic prescriptions...
...And as a socialist, he has been a loyal friend of DissErrr, having, in fact, recently joined our editorial board...
...It seems to me that this deep-rooted national disposition explains much of The Ugly American's success...
...and the two stories devoted to the Indochina war, entitled "The Iron of War" and "The Lessons of War...
...We would meet the challenge, and would in a passionate movement of national self-perfection soon produce all the requirements of unfailing diplomatic success...
...Perhaps most encouraging of all is the way refugee diligence and American refugee aid are being used to open new communities in the hitherto unpopulated and unexploited new lands of the high plateau...
...contribution of less than two million...
...Here again the Russians, whom Lederer and Burdick praise for their better techniques and programs, act quite contrary to our authors' recommendations: "In Afghanistan, a new asphalt road stretches through the main street of the capital city of Kabul...
...In addition to supplying the Thai people with better breeds of poultry, hogs and cattle, our aid technicians have helped them to improve soil fertility, resettle fallow land, make better use of available fertilizers, fight rinderpest, obtain sanitary water and protect their forests...
...The results of a policy that nourishes such fantastic expectations can hardly be anything but a never-ending chain of "losses" and "de feats...
...Toki was thorough and inconspicuous, and his memory was infallible...
...Were the Communists in actual power...
...ones at that," but then he finds nevertheless enough that is positive and worthwhile in this book to conclude that "no thoughtful reader will be able to dismiss The Ugly American lightly...
...All political events arise out of a setting of circumstances and personal involvements that are uniquely their own...
...There are just too many people, even among my personal friends, who either approve of the book or at least maintain that any author attacking the shortcomings of America's Foreign Service and "wasteful" programs of foreign aid, no matter what faults his book may have, deserves to be commended...
...And if Lederer and Burdick have the least bit of talent in describing an actual person, certainly no reader will ever want to meet the man after whom Finian was "drawn from life...
...But no fact, let alone a political fact, can survive such drastic treatment...
...Give us the simplest answer.' " 'I think, sir, that substantial parts of that matter are classified and I cannot reveal them,' Boning said, but his voice lacked conviction...
...No simple solution exists for the many problems that have arisen from our reluctant concern for, and mild supervision over, the regions we loosely call the Free World...
...This was so funny that a "joke" began to circulate "that the quickest way to die was to be made a high official of the Communist party...
...Asch is the prototype of an American "boss," whose language and manners make him as fit for diplomacy as a hippopotamus for the role of a ballerina...
...THE PEOPLE WHO PRAISE The Ugly American although they have read it are not all of one mind...
...I shall pass over the remarkable brain of this political innovator who needed a mere four weeks to speak Burmese in "simple sentences" ("the grammar came quite unconsciously"), and comment on his delicate stomach and weak digestive tract only because of the immense moral importance Finian's creators attach to his suffering from a rather common physical condition...
...The fact remains that in Vietnam, too, our aid administrators and technicians have been doing what Lederer and Burdick demand, long before The Ugly American was written, and have done it with results for which even the most caustic detractor of our aid programs should be able to spare a few words of praise...
...It is true that a given sum of money is not the only indicator for the size of a project, but a project for a country of 20 million people costing less than one million dollars in six years can hardly be called big...
...The more patient reader will soon find out that I have my own thoughts on this subject, and will then also understand why I reject the most popular of the premises from which the majority of Americans criticize our foreign policy and programs of foreign aid...
...By disregarding, as it were, the individuality of every fact or event, they deprive us (after having first deprived themselves), of the only key to an understanding of politics as a world of thought and human action...
...There is no truth in the book's message to the American public that the vast majority of our officials in Southeast Asia are still untrained and inexperienced, (which they certainly were five years ago, the period in which most of The Ugly American's stories are placed...
...Our military missions, they say, "advised, and the French went down in defeat, without having studied Mao's writings...
...As Nasser approached Moscow only after we refused to finance the famous Aswan Dam, the Egyptian example would of course only prove—if it proves anything atall— that Communism is thriving not because we are building dams but 25 See in particular The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 1958...
...But no matter what merit such fiction may have as a carrier of general political truths, it can never pass as accurate reporting of contemporary fact for the purpose of specific political argumentation...
...It is of course only natu ral for our foreign policy makers to desire that all non-Communist na tions understand, and approve of, the position we take against further Communist expansion...
...THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WEST'S defeat in Indochina is not nearly so simple as Lederer and Burdick make it out...
...In paying for these copies, the sponsors of The Ugly American intended no invitation to a literary feast...
...According to this list, what we must give to and teach the Asian peoples in order that Communism "can lose its appeal" is improvement of chicken and pig breeding, small pumps, knowledge of commercial fishing, canning of food, improvement of seeds, small village-size papermaking plants, sanitary use of night-soil, and the development of small industries...
...but there is still little understanding of the vices inherent in another and equally widespread approach to foreign aid...
...This explains both the general ignorance on the subject and the prevalence of crude misconceptions...
...But, alas, Indian neutralism is something that can neither be blamed on inept American officials nor will it be overcome merely by better American diplomacy...
...American aid depends, from one year to the other, on whether Congress continues to approve the Administration's Mutual Security Program...
...This is what happened: Shortly before and right after publication, The Ugly Ameri can was bought and distributed in unusually great numbers by private 1 According to a New York Times report from Hollywood of January 26, 1959, Uni versal-International has obtained motion-picture rights to The Ugly American...
...in the New Republic of December 15, 1958...
...But whatever will become of him in Sarkhan, I am sure no reader will want to hear another word about his invention of new anti-Communist tactics...
...I am aware that these pages read like a defense of the mistakes and blunders we undoubtedly make in our foreign policy, and that I am exposing myself to the harsh criticism that such leniency toward our State Department and all other foreign service branches is likely to attract...
...Another example to prove this is an official communication from Saigon, read at the Conference of the American Friends of Vietnam on April 17, 1959 in Washington, D.C., by Major General Samuel L. Myers, former Deputy Chief, USMAAG, Vietnam...
...The first of these reasons was that The Ugly American enjoyed a strong initial promotion not generally available to works of fiction, either good or bad, a promotion that made it what its publishers call "the best selling novel that has become an affair of state...
...On the local level, these activities are a joy to watch for anyone who has seen the stagnation that characterized the life of these regions in 1954...
...Partly a memoir of his experience as leader of the underground socialist movement which fought the Austrian fascist government during the thirties, this book was also an important document about the crisis of modern socialism...
...I condemn it on every score I can think of, and I have no doubt that I will be able to justify my condemnation of it by citing the most telling examples of its political inanity, its distortion of fact, and its insidious attacks against the cause it allegedly defends...
...Such a comparison shows that the aid North Vietnam receives is destined almost exclusively for the kind of big projects that Lederer and Burdick so strongly condemn—at least if they are American-sponsored...
...One issue had an article by Karl Marx in which he attacked the stupidity and backwardness of the peasants...
...A Hanoi radio report said that it was the first modern machinetool-making factory in North Vietnam...
...9 Politically annoyed people who more often than not will refuse to listen to quiet reason on a controversial issue rarely fail to be aroused by an intemperate attack spiced with sensational accusations...
...Whatever statements are made about the successes or failures of American overseas operations in the field of technical assistance and economic aid can be substantiated only New York Times consists of a few figures from an article by James Reston, of March 18, 1958, deploring the language deficiency of our foreign service personnel...
...We may pity a man thus afflicted, but unlike Lederer and Burdick, I do not feel compelled to express admiration for Finian's willingness to continue his work in spite of his sad plight...
...In contrast to India or Burma, Sarkhan has the immense advantage for Lederer and Burdick of existing only in the world of fiction...
...This book was written as fiction," they say in their preface, adding: "but it is based on fact...
...While all this construction is required for military purposes, at the same time it is opening up new areas to resettlement and cultivation which have heretofore been beyond reach because of the impenetrable forests and jungles...
...foreign aid has become a permanent new instrument of international policy...
...For all these reasons, a proper treatment of India by Lederer and Burdick would have shown that our relations to that country will not deteriorate because too few American officials are willing to learn a foreign language or are able to do a good job in whatever capacity they work abroad...
...As in the case of the highways through jungles where the only traffic is by bicycle and on foot, there is nothing concrete about the dams these authors condemn: not one is mentioned by name, no figures are given to show their exorbitant costs, no country is named in which one of these harmful projects is completed, under construction, or planned...
...But if their efforts and sacrifices lead them to believe that they know better than the Asians themselves how Communism must be fought in an Asian country, they should definitely be discouraged from going to the Far East...
...To give them this recognition would seem one way of preserving for this vital field of American political endeavor the many first-rate administrators and technicians we now luckily possess...
...most of Vietnam is quite hilly too...
...11 I find it more remarkable that a paper like the London Times (in its Literary Supplement of February 13, 1959) swallows the inventions and absurdities of The Ugly American hook, line, and sinker...
...You've got to remember," Vinich snaps at his subordinates, "that the worse things are, the better they are...
...Dealing in the main with a country of their own invention therefore does not only mean that the facts Lederer and Burdick present have nowhere existed exactly as they describe them, or that our authors merely foster erroneous ideas about the possibility of applying experiences gained in one country to any other...
...Nor do I want to raise the question of sources in regard to the several fictional letters by foreign service officers contained in The Ugly American, including the cablegram in which the Secretary of State himself replies to Gilbert McWhite's curious ultimatum for a reform of the American diplomatic service...
...American aid thus supplied Thailand, at little expense, with an immense source of low-cost food both for domestic use and export...
...they claim, I am sure for good reasons, that a power station near Saigon is at this stage of Vietnam's economic development a better wa) of providing the additional electricity of which the country is so badly in need...
...Whatever real documentary evidence they happen to put their hands on, they will inevitably learn that our aid programs in Southeast Asia consist mainly of the type of projects that Lederer and Burdick have chosen to advocate with such uninformed zeal...
...They could have written about fictional characters in a setting of their invention and still have told us many truths about ourselves and our relations to the peoples of Asia whom, with our diplomacy, propaganda and aid, we are so anxiously trying to affect...
...Was it distributed free and if so, where did Finian get the money to supply himself with paper, to house his "machine" and to support himself and his busy crew...
...Since then Mr...
...I. H. What Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night about greatness in men one could also say about that mysterious something in books that makes them bestsellers: Some are born with it, some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them...
...But because this "novel" is doing political harm, I shall now show in some detail how Lederer and Burdick have bungled the task they set out to accomplish, and thereby struck a heavy blow at the cause which their book claims to serve...
...Exports, which totalled only 200,000 tons of rice in 1957 could be raised to 1 million tons...
...In October 1957, the Iranian Seven Year Development Plan Organization signed a contract with Morrison-Knudsen International in the amount of about $41 million for completion of the Karaj dam and the construction of a power station...
...Listen, you damn fools," says the "ugly" American Homer Atkins to the bureaucrats, "it's a simple problem...
...Lederer and Burdick could also have mentioned that many competent and devoted Americans have now worked for quite a number of years in Indian villages on the kind of "small projects" for which The Ugly American makes such narrowminded propaganda, and whose benefits Lederer and Burdick praise with such unbalanced zeal...
...The quotation from the Epilogue is merely a restatement, in non-fictional terms, of the authors' disparaging opinions, without even as much as a reference to the many serious books and documents on foreign aid that might have helped them to substantiate some of their less flagrant assertions...
...The reader will remember how emphatically Lederer and Burdick disapprove of the passion they ascribe to our aid officials and technicians for building highways and dams...
...Not once do these authors mention the painful truth that in our relations with other countries we are likely to meet obstacles which diplomatic proficiency alone will never overcome...
...Even firm supporters of our foreign aid policy are now likely to talk only on the defensive and frequently even sneer at our so-called idealism, for which our only reward is said to be a growing "anti-Americanism" all over the world...
...one of the two stories about the "ugly" American Homer Atkins (who later goes to Sarkhan...
...A man, experienced in training foreign service officials, points out the other side: "Other things being equal, it is far better for an American overseas to know the language of the people with whom he deals...
...The gravity of the subject would make newspapers and magazines pay immediate attention to the book, the more so as it was said to be "not only important but consistently entertaining...
...During my last visit to Vietnam in summer 1958, I also observed the enthusiasm with which the officials, both American and Vietnamese, promote the installation of these pumps, often over the resistance of the older peasants, who remain sceptical toward new techniques even after they have been proven superior to the old ones...
...But it so happens that the United States ambassador to the Philippines is Charles F. Bohlen, a name that needs no introduction to admirers of highly competent and proficient career diplomats...
...Navy, who caused India to remain in her "neutralist" rut...
...The Russians, whose bureaucratic regime favors all kinds of misconduct in appointments to official positions, are far from being as per...
...In each issue there was an article by a famous Communist—Stalin, Marx, Lenin, Mao Tsetung, Chou En-lai, Plekhanov...
...Our setbacks and adversities in Asia have confused and tired many Americans, and have dampened the public's enthusiasm with which it attended the inauguration of our programs of foreign aid...
...Agricultural diversification and processing is essential to the development of economic self-sufficiency in Thailand and the northeast is the key area in this regard...
...it only stresses how strongly our attitudes are molded by this concern...
...The subject of foreign aid is a complex one...
...Salomon Asch, although as improbable a character as you will ever meet in fiction, is Lederer's and Burdick's hero of this story...
...Two I chose because of the large volume of aid they receive...
...Such projects "would not only make friends, while costing little, but are also prerequisite to industrialization and economic independence for Asia...
...I know, of course, that an effective political argument is not always factually sound or based on impeccable reasoning...
...Finian, we learn, read all the important books on Communism from Marx to Stalin before he reached his politically original conclusion...
...But if they invented places, events and names, why did they not invent all the characters they portray, instead of rather ungallantly making some of them recognizable for anyone familiar with our diplomatic services in the area...
...Not even the many Americans who refuse to see that other people have reasons as solid and convincing to them as ours can deny this...
...rather because we are not...
...In view of this momentous historical result, it would be ridiculous to belabor the question (which no one will ever be able to decide) whether the obvious benefits derived by the West from our aid to Vietnam are more the effect of the many small or the few big projects we have been supporting in this important Southeast Asian country...
...Our experts rejected the project as too big and too costly, while the "native economists," apparently unconsulted by Lederer and Burdick, insist that without this dam or a similar source of electric power, South Vietnam will never be able to keep pace with the economic progress that is being made in the Chineseand Russian-supported Communist North...
...The other side of this false coin is an unwillingness to see that deep dissensions, like grave errors, must also have deep causes...
...IV But let us forget Father Finian and take a brief look at Sarkhan...
...Let any reader who suspects that I am now myself guilty of exaggeration examine the so-called Factual Epilogue with which Lederer and Burdick conclude their book...
...The reasons are obvious: these provinces have little potential for economic development...
...The road, financed by Soviet credits, was built by Afghan laborers with Soviet machinery, under the supervision of Soviet civil engineers...
...Of the experience our officials gathered through the administration of our various European aid programs little is applicable to Asia...
...Do Lederer and Burdick give any proof in support of this accusation...
...I suggest that those who are willing to embark on a study of foreign aid avoid for the beginning the many books and documents written in defense of the ongoing operations...
...it cannot be treated without expert knowledge, and anyone who tries to present it as simple is likely to be incorrect and unfair...
...It is true that our aid mission in Iran proposed and supported the construction of this multipurpose dam, but no one has ever produced evidence in support of a Reader's Digest story according to which our aid administration forced this project on the reluctant Iranian ofcials who allegedly would have preferred a power station in Teheran?r When American support for this project was not forthcoming to the desired extent, the Iranians, far from dropping the project, decided to complete it with their own funds...
...And what did these peasants get to read in order to learn that the Communists intended to ruin them...
...It would indeed be foolish, if not reckless, to accept the easy-sounding remedies that these authors offer for the troubles we have in our relations with other countries...
...Above all, Americans have during the last ten years shown an increasing, if still unsteady concern for "world affairs...
...and they constantly twist the meanings of facts and events through their failure to comprehend either the irreducible complexity of international relations or the difficulties, novel and perplexing, that are inherent in the policy of foreign aid...
...The reader will now rightly expect me to justify this indictment by proving how worthless as fiction and untrue to fact The Ugly American is...
...Wells, and pumps too, have been supplied to numerous Thai villages through this many-sided program about which even in Senator Ellender's faultfinding survey an occasional laudatory remark can be found...
...Of these 40,000 there are in the entire Far East less than 1,200 employed by the 28 That there can be little economic progress in the Middle East without the construction of at least half a dozen major dams is shown convincingly by Eric Johnson, in an article in the New York Times Magazine of October 19, 1958, "A Key to the Future of the Mideast...
...Unlike Schary, Lederer and Burdick carefully avoid giving the people they describe their real names...
...If there is any logic at all in The Ugly American's political reasoning—which says that "almost costless" projects are the best way for America to make friends in Asia—Communism can have no real chance in Laos...
...It occurs in connection with the authors' attempt to explain what factual conditions they meant to dramatize with their story of Tom Knox, the fictional chicken expert in Indochina, whom the French, for quite unaccountable reasons, take such trouble to corrupt...
...Because they take their p^ rsonal rules of conduct as universally valid and denounce any deviatio t as a breach of moral law, they are essentially unfit to work harmo: ,iously with others, and are usually wi ning to accept cooperation oniy on tnelr own strict terms...
...Let us engineers solve it and come back with what we've been able to do...
...Questions of this nature are never raised by Lederer and Burdick, who also ignore the "fact" that hardly more than thirty per cent of these northern Burmese peasants would be able to read...
...I am proposing a study of Senator Ellender's report because this unique accumulation of facts and figures shows better than any other document I know what is really being done with the money we are spending for foreign aid...
...Indeed, this is the most important item of information for anyone who tries to explain The Ugly American's success: that a special campaign was made in anticipation of the book's political effect...
...In a manner suggesting surprise that no one before him had ever had such a splendid idea, Finian concludes that what he needs is a newspaper in which the Communists can be unmasked...
...However, to admit one's insufficiency of knowledge and to use caution when one is asked to judge the merits of a particular aid program does not mean that one knows nothing and has no opinion at all...
...In addition, the engineers are digging wells, supervising the construction of cantonments and barracks, etc...
...As in most types of science-fiction, with which The Ugly American has much in common, it is the engineer and technician with an anti-political turn of mind who provide the solutions for all major problems...
...Even Senator Ellender, who misses no opportunity to show up our smallest failings and minces no words in castigating what he calls our "overambitious planners," feels obliged to contradict the people who use American aid to Afghanistan as proof that our aid does more harm than good...
...And so does the London Economist, which goes even farther than the Times in dropping its customary sophistication...
...15 In pressing this point, I am not at all concerned with the question whether the characters of the book, such as the "ugly" American Homer Atkins, Father Finian, Colonel Hillendale, the Ambassadors Sears and McWhite, Senator Brown, or any other of its many improbable figures, are really "drawn from life...
...He proceeds to produce one, on a "machine" with which he had wisely provided himself before leaving the "jungle...
...To encounter an American of such pretensions should be reason enough for the most trusting of all Burmese to test his motives and to question his political sanity...
...376-385 for Laos, and pp...
...These I must warn to get ready for a surprise...
...About this "device by which the authors have reached a very large popular audience8 I shall have more to say later on...
...Dams, however, whether they are of the kind we are building or have refused to build, are a big enough problem of American overseas operations to deserve the few lines that are necessary to refute what The Ugly American has to say on this subject...
...5 Obviously, this book which James A. Michener found "delightfully readable," John P. Marquand "urgent and fascinating," Morris Ernst "squarely based on fact," Max Lerner "full of concreteness and substance," and the publishers themselves "wonderfully humorous" was written as "a deadly warning entertainingly...
...The name of Joseph Buttinger first became familiar to the American political public several years ago, when he published his book In the Twilight of Socialism...
...That was the end...
...However, the "climax" came only with the arrival of a man from Moscow, a Russian expert on Burma...
...I do not want to discuss here why I considered our Indochina policy before 1954 as basically mistaken, nor what could have been the alternative to American support for the French in the Indochina war...
...If I now proceed to render some of these opinions and ideas from The Ugly American's twenty fictional pieces into plain political language, the reader can be assured that I am doing this not with malice or from a desire to "entertain...
...If their daily troubles during the Indochina war had not forced them to study their enemy's military tactics, the many French journalist and writers conversant with this subject would certainly have prevented the substance of Mao's writing from remaining a secret in French Indochina and France...
...I refer to the peculiar license Lederer and Burdick have arrogated to themselves in their manner of treating as fiction what they want us to accept as fact...
...they distort, through boundless exaggeration, the truth in respect to conditions that justify some of their criticism...
...nor can any other publication demonstrate more convincingly that their undocumented facts are as unrelated to American overseas operations as are the characters of their stories to real life...
...BUT ALTHOUGH the new rice fields and orchards, the small roads and local irrigation systems in the Center provinces of Vietnam proved to me that our aid can give life and prosperity to a war-ravaged country, I could not forget for a moment that the total of these cheering efforts, assuming that they will all bear fruit, does little to make Vietnam "economically independent...
...6 Washington Post, October 5, 1958...
...It is clear to me that they en tered The Ugly American's strange world of pseudo-fact and fiction quite unsuspectingly, that they went along with its highly questionable premises and fantastic conclusions as something acceptable only under the license granted to works of fiction, and that political considerations now make them treat as "fact" what they would undoubtedly have rejected had Lederer and Burdick offered it as an unadorned history or in a straight political report...
...The laws of politics are not identical with the laws of warfare...
...The truth of fiction can indeed be of a quality that makes the claim of factual accuracy superfluous...
...Both passages are concerned with the well-known fact that our Foreign Serv ice is deficient in the knowledge of foreign languages, and both, inci dentally, disprove Lederer's and Burdick's contention that our leaders are unaware of and unworried by this deplorable fact...
...velopment project, South Vietnam has been trying to have it financed by the Development Loan Fund, which was created two years ago for precisely such purposes...
...It is sufficient to know who were the recipients of this present: they were members of Congress, newspaper editors, writers on foreign affairs, commentators on radio and television, leaders of business, government officials, and countless other individuals believed to possess some influence in public life...
...This is why the most thorough study of Mao's writings could never have saved the French...
...The expression "nuts" in reply to his collaborators when he disagrees with anything they say sums up very neatly the major talent of this diplomatic genius, which consists in his ability to think of himself as superior to anybody around him, be he American or Asian...
...reproduce a letter which is signed by Morris Ernst and endorsed by Senators John F. Kennedy and Clair Engle, the Rt...
...I puzzled a long time over the first paragraph of The Ugly American which begins, in "A Note from the Authors," with the statement that the book was written "as fiction" although it is based on fact...
...This means that actual deliveries will soon exceed American aid to the South, and, more important still, that the leaders of the North, unlike our allies in the South, were assured of support for their economic development projects for at least ten years...
...Construction was carried out by an American firm...
...20 With two important exceptions—repair of the war-damaged transportation system and refugee resettlement—the Vietnamese technical assistance and economic aid program is quite similar to the one we operate in Thailand, although, because of the effect of the long Indochina war, large and costly rehabilitation efforts reduced the proportion of money available for smaller projects...
...The Russians, of course, know this...
...i The efforts Russia and Communist China are making to speed the economic development of North Vietnam are tremendous...
...26 IN REGARD TO THE KARAJ DAM In Iran, which Lederer and Burdick must have had in mind but decided not to mention, the story is different, but it is no more suitable to prove our aid officials to be dam-building maniacs than the story of the Helmand Valley...
...Placed frequently between two governments adhering to different philosophies of social action, and always the first ones to receive the blame if either side is disappointed by the results of foreign aid, these men are in urgent need of some public recognition for their services to America and the community of free nations...
...In the great struggles of our time, our enemies have always made their plans and tactics known in advance...
...And his plan to destroy The Communist Farmer, Lederer and Burdick assure us, "was so good it almost deserved to succeed...
...Lederer and Burdick bring up India because they want to demonstrate what dreadful harm the unreliability and incompetence of Americans stationed in the Far East have already done...
...Approximately the same number is working under various ICA contracts (mostly with universities), and another 1,200 for the Department of State...
...Last year, our newspapers and magazines gave us one dose after another of downright unpleasant news about the waste, inefficiency, and lack of meaningful projects that supposedly characterize the administration of American foreign aid...
...notwithstanding, there is in Vietnam no "rising tide of anti-Americanism...
...They are indeed only more or less reliable impressions, selected by two minds whose polemical determination made it apparently impossible for them to absorb anything contrary to their own strong views...
...agency charged with the administration of foreign aid (International Cooperation Administration—ICA...
...FOREIGN AID is a subject about which nothing at all can be proved by advancing forceful opinions...
...The reason may be that I have seen many Americans quite ready to eat the food of an Asian people whenever they were obliged by their tasks, or privileged enough in their local human relations, to share some of these people's lives...
...But too many Americans are unfortunately still chasing after the elusive goal of quick and cheering solutions for baffling political problems...
...A brief analysis will reveal that they contain, in addition to an expression of opinion—that small projects are "far more helpful" than big ones—two categorical statements: that "billions" are being spent on the "wrong" aid projects, and that most American technicians abroad are involved in the building of dams, highways, and irrigation systems...
...The reader will be surprised to learn that he has none of the "training and professional experience" without which our officials, according to other pages of the book, are bound to offend the governments, and to misjudge the people, of the countries we are trying to befriend...
...they touch upon the problem of how a nation that takes the superiority of its political institutions and aims for granted can produce enough individuals capable of understanding foreigners whose beliefs and desires contradict their own...
...In February, a new agreement was signed in Peiping according to which North Vietnam will receive aid from Communist China equivalent to $168,775,000...
...And we must certainly demand (as did Secretary of State Dulles long before Lederer and Burdick) that our diplomats speak the language of the country in which they are stationed...
...But many new taxes have been introduced to finance the various projects of the plan: in the future the Indian consumer will have to pay more for his various luxuries because of higher indirect taxes...
...He had allowed himself to be seduced by a Chinese agent...
...Unaware of the utter inadequacy of their approach, their stories and fictional documents add up to such an atrocious misrepresentation of facts that even the book's minor accuracies disappear behind its dominant features of unreality and falseness...
...Thus it has come about that even the stoutest proponents of American economic and military assistance to non-Communist countries are now half-hearted in the defense, confused about the practice, and doubtful about the aims of our entire program of foreign aid...
...They are Thailand and Vietnam...
...10 I doubt whether those who bought it for entertainment were as numerous as the buyers whose motive was a serious political concern...
...Laos is both poor and strategically important for the defense of Southeast Asia against a Chinese-supported Communist attack...
...And who would have the courage—provided he found the indispensable arguments—to quarrel with the objectives that Lederer and Burdick apparently pursue...
...As MIGHT BE EXPECTED from a man of his profession, Father Finian's approach to politics is t] at of a strict moralist, if not actually of a religious fanatic, an appro2 h with which I am the last one to - quarrel provided it is understooc to mean only the manner in which someone engaged in politics may conceive of his personal task...
...Here the visitor will find plenty of villages supplied with small pumps, doing precisely what the pumps are doing that Homer Atkins supposedly invented for "mountainous" Sarkhan, the imaginary country of The Ugly American...
...They are fiction, and any claim for them to have a basis in fact is too ludicrous to be made the object of a political discussion...
...In rice, these efforts will soon make the center of Vietnam self-supporting, for the first time in about two hundred years...
...A New York Times report from Hongkong of February 18, 1959, says that the money "will be used for forty-nine industrial and communications enterprises in North Vietnam, including new iron and steel plants, coal mines, ship-yards, nitrogen fertilizer plants, electric power stations, railways, textile mills and a paper mill...
...He has written a study of Indochinese history, The Smaller Dragon, which is an outgrowth of his deep concern with the struggle of the people of Vietnam to secure its freedom and independence from both French and Communist imperialism...
...The reward of high sales is not one reserved only for good books...
...I cannot go on to say how this excellent but undisclosed plan went wrong without first reminding the reader, by way of excuse for myself, of the many prominent people and papers that found The Ugly American so wonderfully humorous, so delightfully readable, so important and completely persuasive, so full of concreteness and substance, so squarely based on fact...
...But in attacking undeniable shortcomings and abuses many of the book's arguments are spoiled by loose generalization...
...Nor does he seem to know that they had done well against tremendous odds, and in fact already defeated the Communists when Finian, after deciding to save them, "crystallized his plan of attack...
...This may give us an answer to the question what kind of aid is most likely to reduce a country's future need of aid...
...Some of these obstacles consist of vital economic interests, of rigid ideological positions, of inflexible political views...
...This "cunning" was so successful that "initially the Communists did not know whether to support or oppose the newspaper," which "appeared mysteriously and suddenly in market places, stores, doorsteps, village squares, buses and streets...
...In resettling refugees, much is being done to develop the economic wealth of Vietnam...
...Such language is quite in character with a man who from his position of unconscious Western and white conceit regards the Burmese —unless the opposite can be proved in a series of humiliating tests to which he submits them—as potential cowards, liars, and thieves...
...54), an amount with which even the ingenious "ugly" American Homer Atkins (assuming he would bother with anything bigger than a bicycle or a small pump) could build no dams, highways or irrigation projects...
...Ask any admirer of The Ugly American to reread the story "Captain Boning, USN" and then let him tell you where in the real world of international politics the facts can be found, or reasons discovered, on which this preposterous tale is based...
...For these reasons, I have welcomed every article or book that attempted to show in what respects our aid policies might be misguided and our administrative performances poor...
...12 Indeed, only if the reviewers had consisted exclusively of experts capable as well as determined to pick out the book's faults and contradictions could their general verdict have been less favorable than it was...
...This would have justified, once India was given fictional treatment, some reference in the Factual Epilogue to the huge and highly complicated task of maintaining, in the face of a quickly developing Soviet economic offensive, our present tolerable relations to this largest of all "uncommitted" countries of the world...
...The linking of Bangkok to the northeast with an allweather road is of very high priority in the improvement of Thailand's communications...
...What we learn from the stories located in this country about our Foreign Service is indeed sad and revolting...
...they put these in surroundings of verifiable historical "facts," and yet we would not accept the fiction of these authors as a substitute for factual history...
...But, alas, no "hints" on how to get it...
...But I challenge every single person who has publicly praised the factual accuracy of this book to show me where in the entire epi logue he has discovered anything resembling a source, let alone one that could pass as proof for the many specific accusations that Lederer and Burdick make against our aid programs in Southeast Asia...
...2 At this date, about 150,000 copies of The Ugly American have been sold...
...This peculiar definition of Communism is given by Father Finian, one of the few heroes The Ugly American offers (kingsize, like many a recent American product...
...And is there a reliable way of measuring the effect American aid has on the fortunes of a particular Communist party...
...Let us admit that there are good reasons for not using the real names of the people about whom they write...
...Unfortunately, the people who most vigorously preach the gospel of America's involvement with the fate of the world are largely dominated by two entirely different but equally problematic ways of thinking in regard to American political action abroad...
...II As I am about to give a few examples that show what I mean by the political inanities of this book, I am addressing myself particu larly to the many people who have openly endorsed The Ugly Amer ican, chiefly, I believe, because they expected it to arouse a livelier public interest in foreign policy and to contribute in some ways to the public's education on foreign aid...
...to the American-financed aid projects, I would like to add that the cost of these efforts is largely carried by the Vietnamese themselves, on a provincial and even a village scale...
...Some recurrent prophecies of disaster 19 Projects undertaken for military reasons are as a rule executed in such a manner as to be of immediate economic benefit to the countries...
...These stories all describe events and conditions, real or imaginary, of at least six years ago...
...Stupidity or laxity on the part of an American ambassador is rarely the main cause of a particular American political failure, and a lack of training or devotion by our aid officials does not explain most instances of Asian dissatisfaction with American aid...
...they are in teresting as facts only through the very singularity and concreteness that distinguish them from all others...
...And so they proceeded...
...This is not the case with most other statements, theories, and alleged facts in this book...
...But how much and what kind of aid would serve our mutual interests best I do not feel qualified to say...
...Tolstoy modelled his Napoleon, Hemingway his Andre Marty, and Schary his Franklin D. Roosevelt as closely and faithfully on their known real characters as they could...
...BECAUSE OF THEIR FEAR of discussing the troublesome question of our military assistance programs to non-Communist nations, Lederer and Burdick have missed their only chance to build up some sort of a case against the volume, the type and the administration of our aid to at least one Southeast Asian country...
...The truth is that American foreign aid faces tasks, and American foreign policy problems, which no amount of common sense and good will can solve, let alone solve in a short time and to everybody's satisfaction...
...There was never an Indian delegation that considered the acceptance of American thermonuclear weapons for storage in India, and if the Indians should ever change their minds they will get these weapons, no matter how many nights American captains spend in bed with pretty Chinese girls...
...Burma, although no longer troubled by American aid, is actually made the locale of a long story, another one about that rare phenomenon, the American in Asia, of whose beliefs and activities Lederer and Burdick approve—needless to say, he is not a government official...
...There will be tax increases also on tea, sugar, automobile tires, and many other local and imported items to cover part of the deficit of the 1959-60 budget, which even a cutback of $50,000,000 for India's armed forces cannot balance...
...This dam, which the Vietnamese want, is not being built because our experts opposed it...
...This is how Lederer and Burdick describe the historical scene: "'Goddam the man,' Asch said to himself, 'this is the time when he should have snapped out the answer...
...But apart from these reservations, I am willing to concede the usefulness of the small projects proposed by Lederer and Budick...
...This explains why its outstanding features were community development projects and stimulation of village activities...
...Joseph S. Berliner, Soviet Economic Aid, p. 1.) 27 Van Rensselear, Bernard S., "How Not to Handle Foreign Aid," Readers Digest, February 1957...
...IT IS IN THE AUTHORS' rejection of this truth that I find the explanation for The Ugly American's double failure: this book neither gives us real facts nor is it good fiction...
...But in the case of The Ugly American, success was due neither to advertising and the many enthusiastic reviews nor to the fair reputation Lederer and Burdick had separately gained with their earlier writings...
...For the benefit of readers who have recently heard that prominent Americans requested that the aided countries be required to contribute 22 Tibor Mendes, in Le Figaro, April 6, 1957...
...Buttinger is doing here is showing how the catchwords and conceptions of liberalism can be appropriated by sensationalistic writers for the popular market and thereby put to quite illiberal uses...
...A complete disregard for this fundamental truth is one of the reasons why The Ugly American is a politically harmful book...
...From a remark in another story one is led to believe that his paper was at the beginning an "underground paper...
...Between 1951 and 1956, United States dollar contributions to Indonesia have totaled $41.7 million...
...they were unworried by its political improbabilities...
...given"a in order to...
...and if I am not misreading a paragraph on a project entitled "disposal of waste," our aid experts in Vietnam concerned themselves already years ago with the use of night-soil, without, however, claiming thereby to have discovered an especially effective means of breaking the Communist tide...
...Right now I should confess that I disapprove of this book not only because it failed to provide me with the sensations I expect of a work of fiction...
...but that our foreign services are in need of "well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals" is a contention with which not even defenders of our State Department, if any such still exist, are likely to disagree...
...We are concerned with the question what kind of projects—whether big or small—our aid officials actually promote...
...To mention an even more difficult problem: I have long been inclined to believe that our costly program of military aid to Laos can be justified only on the basis of rather fantastic political and military conjectures...
...Lederer and Burdick knew that their subject could be treated better in a volume of short stories, all of them designed to arouse indignation and simultaneously provide amusement about the deplorable facts behind our political failures abroad...
...In fact, I have done so myself, with effects quite similar to those suffered by Father Finian, but without realizing that there was something heroic in my ordeal...
...No ambassadorial genius in languages and the other arts of diplomacy could have been successful with Vietnamese nationalists as long as his main task was to defend our policy of support for the French in Indochina...
...I It requires a close look at The Ugly American's Epilogue to discover that the facts on which this fiction is based are either chimerical or conspicuously lacking...
...This story, incidentally, describes conditions which, if they existed at all, existed five years ago...
...All his training as a Jesuit," Lederer and Burdick tell us, "all his alertness, every available trick and wile had been necessary" to find the eight Burmese whom Finian was eventually willing to trust...
...Foreign Assistance Programs, "she can be made fully self-sustaining, richer and economically stronger, and hence a more powerful and valuable ally, with the proper help...
...But if small projects "make friends," and big ones tend to be harmful, the very insignificance of our aid to Indonesia should rule out any adverse political effect...
...One does not have to make a guess in order to know what was on Lederer's and Burdick's minds when they started to collaborate, by means of long distance telephone and tape recorders, on their stories of "almost comic-strip simplicity"3 about the "stupid marplots, innocent third-raters, squanderers, cookie-pushers, clowns and bibulous, boastful parasites"4 who allegedly represent America abroad...
...In regard to the other seven, whom Finian did not require to be Catholic but merely that "they be honest and courageous," he comments with equal tact that this was "asking quite a bit...
...When Homer Atkins got into trouble with our officials in Vietnam, the French were still running the country, and it was the clever French, not our slow-witted American officials, who planned and conducted the tours that eventually defeated Senator Brown's robust body and inquisitive mind...
...The one exception is the settlement project for the high plateau...
...Even if we take into account the existing diversity of opinion as to what makes a project good and what makes it "wrong," this statement is the most serious accusation that can be made against our programs of foreign aid...
...The only remark made by Lederer and Burdick about their fictional country which I cannot dispute is that "Sarkhan is different from Vietnam" (and not only because it is "very hilly...
...I shall try to do this with a few general observations on America's present state of mind in regard to foreign policy and foreign aid...
...14 The Factual 14 Lederer and Burdick quote Dulles as saying: "Interpreters are no substitute...
...This will surprise no one who has ever realized how shamefully negligent the colonial regime has been in these two fields...
...They concern the question of how a people can have political comprehension of any other if it is unaware of the permanent need to politically comprehend itself...
...Their absurdity is quite untainted by either fact or reason, as anyone whose knowledge of Southeast Asia is not nullified by a lack of political judgment will see if he reads the book...
...Nothing "huge" resembling a highway can be built with two million dollars in six years, nor with the larger amounts we have been spending in 1957 and 1958 to help Thailand develop the roads she needs as one of the indispensable conditions of economic progress...
...The point of the story, without which I would not be able to make my own, concerns the unachieved purpose of this imaginary conference, and to a lesser degree the reason for its failure...
...Except for the years of the two World Wars, there have never been more people than now in this country who realized how grossly its security and welfare would be neglected if we professed that the security and welfare of other nations is beyond American preoccupation...
...23 The total rice acreage in South Vietnam was 5,250,000 between 1935 and 1939...
...Toward the end of the conference, the Indian delegation was about to accept the hydrogen bombs offered by America (apparently behind the backs of Nehru and Krishna Menon...
...As to the reasons, the reader will have no trouble finding them, and may easily find them also praiseworthy, even if most are far from sound...
...The outcome of this race will probably decide whether Communism will triumph in India and thus inevitably spread over the entire Asian world...
...It would be foolish to believe that this is due only to hostile propaganda...
...I know that the book was not written to give us exact and sufficient information for sober judgment but rather to denounce and attack and thereby move us into some sort of action...
...Although properly listed as fiction, The Ugly American is not really a book about the problems and fates of human beings...
...Only three of the "big" projects are in the field of transportation...
...Duties on cigarettes will be increased by 16 per cent, in a country where a package of fifty costs one dollar, the equivalent of at least five dollars for an American package of twenty compared by the level of wages and salaries...
...This includes the more than 22,000 American civilians working overseas for the Department of Defense...
...But this truth (of which the best one can say is that it sounds slightly dated), is unfortunately well-hidden by the Communists...
...If, as I confidently expect, the refugee resettlement effort is successfully completed this year with the funds now available, Free Vietnam will have achieved a success without parallel and will have added fundamentally to its economic well-being in the process...
...However, in contrast to the much-discussed second Five-Year Plan, whose emphasis is on industrialization,, the first Indian Five-Year Plan was directed toward increased food production...
...This is why Clement Johnson does not blame our aid officials in Thailand for urging the construction of a multi-purpose dam on the Chao Phraya river, which would add 5 to 7 million acres to the existing rice land, provide the country with badly needed flood control and water conservation, and give Thailand her first major power plant...
...Ellender even shares Lederer's and Burdick's opinion about the value of small projects, opposing big ones, however, chiefly because they cost more money and impede his real aim, which is an early termination of most programs of foreign aid...
...In fact, even to "save" some minor strategic position, in the sense of forcing an unwilling country to change its present stand, has now become virtually impossible, both for the United States and Rus sia, without unleashing the accumulated forces of universal destruction...
...Their aim was the same as that of the people who bought The Ugly American by the carload because they hoped this book, if read "at a million American firesides, would loosen upon this Congress, perhaps upon the Administration, a storm that would blow them off the magic carpet they have inhabited these many years...
...They have had in their colonies some experience with guerillas for more than a hundred years...
...The place Lederer and Burdick call Burma never emerges as a real country, which in Asia too means a complex of social conditions, conflicting political interests and a great variety of public institutions...
...However, the authors' assertion about the billions we spend (the usual word is "waste") on wrong projects calls for as close an examination as the available documentary evidence permits...
...The fundamental question of how the concrete purposes and overall aims of American policy in Asia might enhance or diminish the effectiveness of our officials abroad is never even mentioned in this book...
...But we are here not concerned with the relative merits of small and big projects...
...For this she needs steel, and this is why her leaders seem to be obsessed with the 29 For an informative discussion of India's needs for her Second Five-Year Plan, see Matthew J. Kust, "U.S...
...This, however, contradicts only in a minor way what Lederer and Burdick say about the relationship between their facts and their fiction...
...There are too many examples of fluent linguists failing to communicate and too many cases of those who murder the language or depend entirely on interpreters somehow 'getting across,' to permit us to consider language proficiency as the central factor in success abroad...
...In principle, this is as desirable a way of trying to improve political decisions as I can think of, but the manner in which Lederer and Burdick went about it is most deplorable, to say the least...
...Let no one think that India herself is making no efforts to pay the cost of her second Five-Year Plan...
...It has done what our mutual security aid should do, that is, improve the way of life of present citizens, not future generations...
...Through the costly refugee program, one such project was realized with universally acclaimed success...
...The success of American foreign policy in Asia depends primarily on the image we create of America in the minds of the Asian peoples, and on the effect upon them of America's basic political aims...
...I know that this support was always given with twinges of conscience, under the misconception that the struggle for Indochina had ceased to be an anti-colonial revolution and had become merely a localized war between the Communist world and the democratic West...
...but even a superficial reading of some of their stories will reveal that Lederer and Burdick are richly endowed with ideas and opinions, many of them so ostentatiously original as to be quite devoid of sense...
...Still more important for an informed criticism of American foreign aid policies and operations are the reports of the special study missions of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the published Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy...
...The Ugly American's attacks on the people who work for our government abroad are at least thinly related to some reality and become nonsensical mainly through boundless exaggeration...
...The sum of $26,000 was allocated for first aid kits, a total of $24,000 for malaria control, and no more than $13,500 to promote inland fish culture...
...AT LEAST FOUR of The Ugly American's twenty stories deal with Vietnam: the story of Senator Jonathan Brown, who tried to find out what was done with the billions we spent for the French in Indochina...
...More ambiguous is the anonymous reviewer who criticized the book in The Christian Science Monitor...
...345-428 for Thailand, pp...
...This means not only that the urgent power project agreed upon for South Vietnam a year ago will probably not get started for another year...
...To answer this question, we do not have to ask publishers and dealers for the names of the people (and organizations) who delighted them with unusually large orders...
...Last year, in a dispatch from Hongkong, dated April 12, 1958, the New York Times reported that a "machine-tool plant covering fourteen acres was dedicated at Hanoi...
...Even if the Corn munists did not know better than to write books that teach us how we can defeat them, the study of their books would still not have helped to win the Indochina war...
...And it is contained in the equally undocumented statement about our alleged preference for big projects...
...Much is being said about the gigantic race for a better life that goes on between the world's two most populous countries, India and China...
...271 and 269...
...For two reasons, both entirely unconnected with its intrinsic quality...
...It was the reviewers who created these expectations...
...Macapagal blamed his own government for most of the tensions presently existing between the two countries, accusing the Garcia regime of fostering anti-Americanism to divert attention from a graft-riddled administration...
...One feature of these disputes is that the many participants who would "not give a damn" if someone else paid the bill have lately begun to dominate them with their petulance and lack of understanding...
...There is not a word to be found in The Ugly American about the political parties of Burma, the country's government, her officials, her army, or the Burmese efforts to build a society on the principles of democracy and social justice...
...I am referring to the naive contention that our bases and propaganda and the billions we spend for foreign aid are the selfless performance of a historical duty for which our wealth and power, as well as our generosity, have made us fit...
...It is a pitfall for the critic of American behavior abroad of which Lederer and Burdick seem to be entirely unaware...
...dollars by the end of 1956, largely for roads, as our aid officials assure us, of the farm-to-market type...
...To anyone familiar with the real problems, these often sensational reports—forerunners, as it were, of The Ugly American—though far from convincing, are nevertheless as exasperating as they must be to the uninformed wider public interested in international affairs...
...None what soeverl They name no project, refer to no country, give no figures, and do not even bother to mention the several books and many articles whose authors have tried to show that foreign aid is largely a waste of American money...
...James A. Pike (Bishop of California), Julie d'Estournelles (Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and Harold H. Stern...
...I could not help returning to it frequently while reading the book, searching with growing discomfort for an explanation of what I stubbornly felt to be the case: that there was a basic untruth here, that it contained some subtle and vicious contradiction which might well be the key to both the falseness and tastelessness of the whole book...
...Consequently, no other official or private publication is more apt to reveal how shockingly ignorant Lederer and Burdick are of the kind of aid America is extending to the countries of Southeast Asia...
...Foreign aid is once more under heavy attack...
...Only after we rid ourselves of the false notions that The Ugly American has spread can the serious task of criticizing foreign aid begin...
...But would even the most intimate knowledge of Communist military methods and tactical directives have made the French more successful against the Vietminh guerillas...
...The second condition for success in foreign aid is for us to drop the illusion that there exists an unfailing way of knowing in advance what the best projects are for every country, and that our various aid programs are ever going to produce quick material results and gratifying moral rewards...
...they relate to the many reasons why we fail to realize the effect Communism may have on people with whom we differ in needs and ideas more than in the colors of our skins...
...tamed in a recent series of articles from India in the New York Times, by Averell Harriman...
...The rest of the issue was simple reporting of facts about farming difficulties in Russia, the agricultural progress in the United States, hints on how to increase farm production, advice on how to utilize fertilizer...
...but like its invented political background, it is also utterly untrue and offensive...
...They cram into their description of Sarkhan every dubious detail anyone has ever reported from any corner of Asia about the reasons for American failures and Communist gains...
...One of these, the training of Thai technicians for small industries, fulfills the conditions of being "almost costless" and "prerequisite to industrialization" to such a degree that one wonders how Lederer and Burdick could have missed it if they had searched for the relevant facts...
...Nor would The Saturday Evening Post have serialized The Ugly American if its editors 8 Morris Ernst, in his letter to the members of the Senate...
...But knowing what he and his friends are up against (they were "only nine against three thousand active Communists") he employs more "tricks" and "wiles" than the devil himself...
...Foreign Aid," in Foreign Policy Bulletin, January 1959...
...that have been raging over our Iranian aid program, is silent on the Karaj dam in his long report on Iran...
...Another issue offered a speech by Stalin in which he justified his slaughter of the 'kulaks' on the grounds that agriculture must be 'collectivized.' ". (Whether these articles were genuine or the fruit of Finian's "cunning" we are not told...
...In the field of agriculture, more than 1,000 types of rice have been tested to find out which ones are best suited for the different rice areas of the country...
...The Ugly American, I am sorry to say, shows no evidence that Lederer and Burdick have bothered to improve upon their scant and one-sided information through a study of the existing sources...
...It is my conviction that every move toward a better understanding of other countries and for a more effective American foreign policy will be arrested if we listen to people who tell us what Lederer and Burdick untiringly repeat: that the task of making oneself liked and of becoming politically influential abroad is really quite simple...
...A great deal of valuable information on this subject is con...
...They are just another expression of the deep-rooted American conviction that no world problem exists that our skills in technology, manufacturing, and public relations are not able to solve...
...Lederer and Burdick would have done well to ponder a remark Clement Johnson made about the need for roads...
...They are largely mountainous and infertile, and not blessed with minerals or any other kind of natural wealth...
...Names, places, events, they say in their preface, are "our invention...
...One glance at the map will show that to save Laos from Communism is worth some effort, and if money is needed to save it, some money will have to be spent...
...28 I do not want to conclude these remarks without reference to another dam we did not build, the Da Nhim project in South Vietnam, the story of which should servo as a warning for people who base their firm general verdicts on a doubtful particular case...
...The broadcast was a tape recording made by the inconspicuous Toki in a secret meeting of the local Communists...
...Evidently, Sarkhan is the place to which we must send all the people who refuse to believe what The Ugly American has to say about our failures in Southeast Asia...
...However, the failure to produce sources, or any sort of proof, becomes a serious matter as soon as we are dealing with the many claims and accusations that Lederer and Burdick make in discussing the contents of our programs of foreign aid...
...For according to The Ugly American, most of our present troubles in Southeast Asia will be at an end if we train better diplomats, become better linguists, stop getting drunk, replace "bureaucrats" with missionaries and technicians, leave the cities and work in the villages, breed fatter chickens abroad instead of building highways and dams, make our overseas officials renounce their personal comforts and preferably also disregard their good health, reveal to the "natives" the "truth" about Communism, read the books our enemies have foolishly written in order to acquaint us with their true intentions—and above all beware of spies...
...It takes more than a study of the Ellender report to make factually sound and politically meaningful statements about the intricate question of aid to Laos...
...This scheme required that in their treatment of the Indochina war too, the causes of failure had to be reduced to purely technical and personal matters...
...Could it be that Lederer and Burdick shied away from this subject because its proper treatment would have revealed how false most of the premises are on which they base their accusations...
...2 If it did not, the reason may simply be that for a work of fiction to become an exceptionally successful bestseller it is perhaps not quite enough to be a really bad book...
...But these are only additional reasons why I oppose both The Ugly American's diagnosis of our diplomatic insufficiencies and its prescriptions for their cure...
...The French generals in Indochina could have known the collected works of Mao Tse-tung by heart and still would have lacked what they needed to win—sufficient support from the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos...
...To learn the "secret" of an enemy's political strength does not mean that his strength is bound to diminish...
...And they continue: "Most American technicians abroad are involved in the planning and execution of 'big' projects: dams, highways, irrigation systems...
...The efforts of the Vietnamese government, through which hunger has been eliminated in South Vietnam, have raised the total rice acreage in 1956 and 1957 to well over 4,500,000...
...A work of fiction, the authors thought, would enable them to reach people who normally do not read political books...
...But all of this is unimportant for my argument...
...But is it true that Communism has lately made progress in Egypt...
...The French were unable to defeat the Communist guerrillas because they failed to convince the Vietnamese people that the aims of France were compatible with Vietnamese national aspirations...
...Many Americans entered this new service with a firm desire to do more than an official's duty, but not everyone's original enthusiasm survived the wearisome task of learning anew, a task which our passion for publicly castigating our failures in this field does nothing to ease...
...J. Ellender, United States Senator from the State of Louisiana (Senate Document No...
...But before I attempt to show that Lederer and Burdick, in addition to making a mess of known facts, are also making a muddle of current American political ideas, I would like to explain a little further why I believe a refutation of this book to be a pressing political need...
...Others read The Ugly American as they would read an average thriller...
...The costliest of these—highway development— required a total U.S...
...The reason is simply that it was written for a different purpose, which I hope I have accomplished...
...Of these sixty-four, twenty-three cost less than $100,000, twelve less than 50,000, and five less than $10,000...
...The inner logic of this position inevitably leads to an American obligation to "save the world...
...If The Ugly American were only another short-lived bestseller and not also a weapon in the hands of the enemies of foreign aid, I would now repeat that the book is worthless as fiction and untrue to fact, and be done with it...
...If the stubborn solemnity of Lederer's and Burdick's discourse in the Factual Epilogue did not belie such an assumption, I would say that The Ugly American was written to confirm a cynical maxim by Henry Adams, according to which "practical politics consist in ignoring facts...
...In the field of foreign aid, the obstacles for a rapid development of a competent staff of technicians and administrators are tremendous...
...Still another country is the source of Sarkhan's governmentabetted corruption, while a fourth supplies Lederer and Burdick with the material to show that the Communist party has become a strong contender for power in Sarkhan, apparently through our failure to "be more expert in its problems than are the natives...
...These men not only know better, they also are better than The Ugly American depicts them...
...Adequate, good roads, he says, are a condition for Thailand to "quicken business life beyond present concepts...
...Even the reader who has long become aware of the singular meaning Lederer and Burdick give to the word "factual" must be startled by this reluctance to quote figures and names on projects whose very nature determines that there can be only a few...
...21 Representative Walter Judd, who was a member of one of our frequent Congressional Investigation Missions in Asia, said in a speech in Congress on June 6, 1956, that he had found our aid officials in Vietnam "working hard and selflessly on 89 different projects...
...This remedy, of course, would have to ignore the revealing statements made by the Philippine Vice President, Diosdado Macapagal, in an interview on February 18, 1959 as quoted by the New York Times...
...The fact that the Communist party has been outlawed in Egypt, and Nasser's attack against his Communist-supported Arab opponents in Iraq, can scarcely be regarded as proof of Communist progress in Egypt...
...THE ASSUMPTION on which Lederer and Burdick base their hero's "plan of attack" is that all Communist activities aim at making sure that there is no improvement in the people's material condition...
...We must insist on this, even if we can laugh at The Ugly American's warning that local interpreters cannot be trusted to tell Americans the truth...
...There is indeed no reason why an author of fiction who recreates known characters and real events should not produce a valid piece of literary art by being true to the smallest of all verifiable facts...
...we improved the country's main fish marketing facilities...
...the available sources on foreign aid...
...This is the reason why it is necessary to refute this book...
...There is, of course, no dishonor in admitting perplexity in the face of permanently encountered obstacles...
...But although the country of the story entitled "Nine Friends" is about as attractive to us as an empty rice bowl must be to a hungry Burmese, it has the great merit of telling us more about the LedererandBurdick concept of Communism and anti-Communism in Asia than any other story in the book...
...The letter also informs the Senators that the President himself has read The Ugly American and that this fact was largely responsible for the Draper Committee, created to investigate once more our entire aid program...
...We know that Lederer and Burdick consistently identify the wrong kind of aid with the "big" projects for which we allegedly spend billions of dollars, and which "are neither needed nor wanted except by a few local politicians who see such projects as a means to power and wealth...
...Already a remarkable new economic activity is resulting as the road penetrates into the heretofore underdeveloped northeast...
...Even an economist who tried to make South Vietnam prosperous by developing only her vast resources for agriculture would get nowhere without a great number of new projects as big as any we have undertaken so far...
...24 This is just above what we spent at home 23 From a speech given to the Vietnamese-American Association in Saigon, on October 9, 1956...
...THOUGH NEGLECTING to produce one single fact or source, our authors are quite eloquent in explaining why a project is worthwhile only if it is small...
...There are on the one side the military-minded with their narrow concept that success in the arena of power politics depends not so much on our heads as on our war-heads...
...But they did not produce a "novel," as the publishers stubbornly insist on calling The Ugly American...
...fect in respect to the knowledge of foreign languages as The Ugly American describes them...
...the impression they create is that there is hardly a country receiving American aid where most of the money is not sacrificed to this megalomania of construction, and that this unfortunate concentration on big projects is the main cause for the political failure of our programs of foreign aid...
...To the problems we are facing in Vietnam today, the Indochina-stories of The Ugly American are entirely unrelated...
...Lederer and Burdick, in writing The Ugly American, quite obviously did not aspire to produce a work of literary perfection...
...But that is precisely what follows from the premises on which the accusations, condemnations and recommendations of The Ugly American rest...
...Less well known are such upland communities as Gia Kiem, La Lagna and Ban Methout, or such seacoast towns as Ba Ngoi and Ba Lang...
...How many are "big," how many are "small...
...The country could hardly exist, and could certainly not remain outside the Communist sphere of influence, without a substantial amount of American aid...
...What sense would there be in saying of works that are real fiction, such as For Whom The Bell Tolls, or Sunrise at Campobello, that they were written as fiction, or what need in claiming for War and Peace that it is "based on fact...
...The rest, which is only a little less than the entire book, must be rejected, notwithstanding the many random accuracies that flicker over The Ugly American's 285 pages...
...To me it sounds about as convincing as would a fictional representation of America by a foreign writer who showed that in the United States all politicians favor segregation, all labor leaders embezzle union funds, all generals demand an immediate war on Communist China, all intellectuals are drunkards, all Communists are imprisoned, all teenagers are delinquents and all magazines are devoted exclusively to advertising, comic-strips, sex scandals and crime —with a "factual epilogue" giving real examples to prove that this picture of America is "based on fact...
...and it is not surprising if it enraged people who, in reading The Ugly American, somehow managed to forget that the real trouble with Sarkhan is that it does not exist...
...For what Mr...
...It is quite unlikely that Lederer and Burdick never heard of the two cases in which American money was used to help in the construction of a controversial multipurpose dam: the Helmand Valley project in Afghanistan, and the Karaj dam in Iran, two pet subjects of all critics who condemn foreign aid either on principle or because of "inefficiency and waste...
...The evil of Communism," writes Finian in his diary, "is that it has masked from the native peoples the simple fact that it intends to ruin them...
...However, although I regret the widespread indignation over the slight returns in popularity that our generous disbursements produce among the nations we aid, I fully share the general sentiment of dismay over the manifest shortcomings of our efforts...
...The Vietnamese concurred...
...idea of supplying the country with modern steel plants, and if possible even of outdoing the Chinese in the production of steel...
...All of this is self-evident but also one-sided...
...And they continue to reach them, through a dozen other small projects in agriculture and community development, how modern methods can both preserve and put to better use the existing resources of the country...
...V But before I proceed to prove these charges against The Ugly American, I would like to make a point which may well render it superfluous for many readers to bother with a detailed refutation of what the authors relate and preach...
...No, the real absurdities of this book have to do with matters of greater importance, matters that are truly fundamental for a clarification and an effective performance of America's task in the East...
...Such are some of the realities of foreign aid...
...III Let us now move toward India's eastern neighbor and see what The Ugly American can teach us about Burma, one of the few real countries mentioned in the book...
...At this date it is still defying its destiny, which is to drop into the ocean of public indifference where it will lie until Hollywood announces its resurrection.' If I say that its market success was thrust upon The Ugly American, the reason is not only my belief that this book is without intrinsic literary value...
...THIS RATHER NEGATIVE QUANTITY is all the information we get from The Ugly American about India, and about American relations to the country whose political course is likely to decide the fate of the entire Asian world...
...Let us disregard the fictional trimmings of this story and examine the underlying notion which teaches us what Lederer and Burdick regard as the typical actors and aims of American foreign policy in Asia...
...Government Printing Office, Washington: 1958...
...But instead of some facts or sensible ideas on American-Indian relations, all we get is a novel interpretation of contemporary history, according to which a decisive fact like India's "neutralism" does not result from her geographic po sition and economic interests, the inherited concepts and disposition of her masses, or the ideas and passions of her leaders, but is the consequence of ill-timed fornication by a low-ranking official in the United States government service...
...War or peace, survival or annihilation, may depend on the skill with which we use, in Asia and elsewhere, the weapon of foreign aid in the pursuit of our political aims in the international arena...
...In these observations, the reader will find the second of my reasons for saying that the "greatness" of high sales was thrust upon this book...
...A friend of mine had the following experience at the Soviet Consulate in Paris: An official in charge of visa affairs, whose knowledge of English proved to be nil (although he deals with American and British applicants), answered the question whether he spoke French, by pointing emphatically at his own chest and exclaiming indignantly: "Russel" 15 There is a great deal of factual information on American aid to Southeast Asia in Transition and Tension in Southeast Asia, by Nathaniel Peffer, (no publisher given), and on the problems of aid to the underdeveloped regions of the world in Underdeveloped Areas, A Book of Readings and Research, edited by Lyle W. Shannon, Harper & Brothers, 1957...
...Aid projects, therefore, are practicable only in the field of agriculture and community development...
...It is not unreasonable to expect that with sufficient aid for the next few years, Vietnam could achieve this goal rapidly, and that as a consequence the amount of aid to Vietnam could be reduced substantially in the near future—a prospect that should persuade even the newlyformed "Citizens Committee on Foreign Aid" to oppose any cut in the aid we are now giving to Vietnam...
...Yet the chances for India of getting these loans are extremely poor—unless Congress, in a spirit of enlightened self-interest, grasps this historical opportunity "to prove our case," as Walter Lippmann recently wrote, which is "that material progress can be had with civil liberty in a big country...
...I know it is the sign of a good American, not to miss an opportunity to denounce the government bureaucrats and to see virtue in our national prejudice according to which a public official who knows and does his job is as rare as an "honest politician...
...This broadcast, of course, meant the end of Communism in Anthkata...
...In a dispatch from Paris in the New York Times of November 15, 1958, which deals with French army opposition to de Gaulle, C. L. Sulzberger writes: "The army's professional cadres are dominated by men who fought through the unsuccessful Indochina campaign and, in the process, studied the tactics of Mao Tse-tung and his Vietminh Communist friends...
...In order to produce the quantity of rice necessary for Vietnam's "economic independence," the vast regions of available cultivable land in the South have to be opened up...
...Such exports would bring into Vietnam, at present rice prices, 150 million dollars in foreign currency...
...He writes: "We came into the picture long after the project was conceived and started...
...Still, if Lederer and Burdick had come up with some good political fiction, we would easily have forgiven them their curious way of handling contemporary political reality...
...By adding the 450 employed by our Overseas Information Service (USIA), we reach a total of approximately 4,000 Americans working for the United States Government in Asia, less than half of whom are stationed in Southeast Asia, the area of Lederer's and Burdick's confident display of misinformation and brash manufacture of political abuse...
...Which, I suppose, must mean: although written in the form of fiction, what this book says ought not to be regarded as fiction but should be taken as fact...
...But don't bring up these goddam silly questions about politics and native psychology...
...Only two of the "big" projects are concerned with industry and 17 "Ellender Report" (Senate Document No...
...Of the seventyeight projects listed for Thailand, sixty-four fall into this class...
...But I find this a very unsatisfactory explanation, and I feel that a word or two should be said in defense of Asch: within the world created by fiction to show off his greatness, his failure remains a mystery...
...17 THE CRITICAL VIEWS that Lederer and Burdick advance about our aid to Southeast Asia remain also unsupported after an examination of the fourteen "big" projects listed for Thailand, projects of which only one—irrigation and land reclamation—cost as much as three million dollars over a period of six years...
...As to the existing need for, and the merits of, large projects for Thailand, the reader would do well to look up what Clement Johnson, a keen student and sober critic of our Southeast Asia aid program, has to say on this subject, "With Thailand's untapped resources," he writes in his Southeast Asia, U.S...
...for the construction of an unfinished battleship that was already obsolete when it was commissioned, and that was recently sold (with no one in Congress complaining about mismanagement or waste) for $1.5 million...
...Because they believe this book to be "of importance to the nation," they urge the Senators "in the strongest terms" to read it...
...It is carrying out many works, both material and spiritual, that will clearly be of enduring importance to Vietnam in years to come...
...I would favor economic and technical assistance to Laos even if I knew only this: that American aid will soon have produced ten times more Laotian physicians, teachers and technicians than the colonial regime produced in the sixty years during which it exercised its "civilizing mission" over this part of former French Indochina...
...THE TASK OF THE AMERICAN DELEGATION, as I said before, was to persuade some of the "neutralist" Asian governments, in particular the government of India, to permit the storing of American thermonuclear weapons in their countries...
...The Ugly American would be a less harmful book if it had also shown how Congress reduces the effectiveness of our aid programs, a matter of much greater consequence than the questionable "facts" this book offers on highways and dams...
...Some admit that the book is bad, but expect it to lead to at least a re-examination of our military aid programs for South Korea, Formosa, South Vietnam, Laos, and Pakis tan, programs widely regarded as overexpanded...
...Minor failures, or explicable as well as unavoidable mistakes, are belabored until they yield some aspect of the scandalous, which is all that seems newsworthy on this subject...
...Through the effect that The Ugly American has had on the public mind, this book's questionable accuracy and controversial political value have now become major issues in our debates on foreign policy and on the merits of foreign aid...
...This is hard to believe for people whose "practical" approach to politics tells them that better results for American diplomacy and foreign aid depend primarily on a better selection, a better training, and a greater devotion of the people we are sending abroad (as is undoubtedly the case with American performances in the fields of sports and music...
...But I believe that no one who is willing to read the following pages with an open mind will repeat his endorsement of this book with any sign of warmth...
...Vietnam's main difference from Sarkhan is that it exists, which enables the critical reader to examine for himself to what extent the stories located in Vietnam are based on fact...
...Now that I have done with The Ugly American, I should like to say that I came to this book in the same spirit...
...But the prospects are poor that they will soon get the power station our experts and aid mission want them to have instead of the dani...
...Although only a few were deceived about The Ugly American's value as a work of fiction, virtually all of them contributed to its success...
...In order to spare the reader too many figures and lists of projects in actual operations, I shall limit myself to four countries...
...In regard to the costly efforts made by our administration in the field of health and sanitation, the Senator admits that this program "was well worth the money it involved...
...Even a slow-witted participant of the New York Times Youth Forum could tell you that our State Department is not in the habit of appointing "union negotiators" to head American diplomatic missions...
...This is my excuse—and the reader will see how badly I need one—for devoting the following pages to an abbreviated version of Father Finian's Burmese adventure...
...Concerning the widespread opinion that small projects are preferable to big ones, all I want to say at this point is that Lederer and Burdick might at least have given us a few of the reasons why most experts on foreign aid for Asia are unwilling to support this notion...
...Last year's appropriations for the Development Loan Fund have long been exhausted, and at this date, the administration has still not succeeded in extracting from Congress the $200,000,000 it requested months ago to keep the Fund in operation...
...But many more large irrigation projects are necessary to bring it back to over 5,000,000...
...IV Among the countries where the Communist parties have become "strong contenders for power," The Ugly American mentions Laos and Indonesia, in a context suggesting that these are two more examples for the way Communism is being promoted by the wrong kind of American aid...
...show that "our free life well may be lost in a succession of bits and fragments," as the authors say, after having warned us that the Russians, unless our foreign service and foreign aid personnel mend their ways, "will win without firing a shot...
...During the Indochina war it went down to three million by 1949, but rose again to approximately 31/2 million at the end of the war, in 1954...
...This may explain why Senator Ellender, who is quite informed about the controversies 26 Ellender Report, p. 21...
...The semiarid northeast of Thailand to be served by this road is relatively isolated, economically depressed, and vulnerable to subversion...
...the main reason I condemn The Ugly American is the flagrant manner in which it distorts, ignores, or contradicts what in respect to our aid and diplomacy in Southeast Asia I have learned to regard as the essential facts...
...But even if its literary values were a little more than zero, The Ugly American would still be essentially a book about politics, or, to be more precise, a book about United States aid policy and American government officials in Southeast Asia...
...A good example of the manner in which Lederer and Burdick proceed when they discharge their obligation of supplying the reader with facts can be found in the Factual Epilogue on page 281...
...These distinguished citizens," we are told, "sent this letter, with a copy of The Ugly American, to every member of the United States Senate...
...BUT WHILE I MIGHT somehow be able to decide what should be done about aid to Laos, I am quite at a loss to explain how Lederer and Burdick managed to reap praise for a book so full of contradictory statements and monstrous factual errors...
...According to the Ellender report, the "total of actual expenditures in Indonesia by the United States during the 1956 fiscal year aggregated $6.3 million" (p...
...For village improvement, we spent $35,000, for livestock improvement $59,000...
...This, however, exhausts the subjects for the treatment of which I am willing to give Lederer and Burdick some measure of credit...
...and they have to do with our self-righteous notions of what constitutes the "good" and the "truth" of politics, notions that narrow our concepts for action and make them unworkable almost as soon as we leave our shores...
...The wrong kind of aid, the reader will remember, is involvement in big projects, the most sinful of which apparently is the building of dams...
...Our leaders are also unlikely ever to achieve unanimity of opinion in regard to the aid we give, or refuse to give, to the so-called neutral or uncommitted nations...
...He would have failed, as would anyone else, if anyone had ever been charged with his hopeless assignment...
...As was to be expected, "the Communist party was confused for only two issues...
...This makes it the more remarkable that Lederer and Burdick do not give a single example to illustrate how useless and wasteful our efforts to build dams have been...
...7 I believe it was in serious anticipation of these prospects (and possibly because they think that Cassandra was a bore) that Lederer and Burdick decided to make The Ugly American "consistently entertaining," to use the words of the New York Times...
...If they were serious critics they could probably have shown that our relatively large program of military and economic aid to Laos is quite vulnerable, both in respect to size and purpose, and that the many people who have voiced concern over the administration of our Laotian program have probably not spoken without good cause...
...Unfortunately, no American money is as yet being spent on one really big Vietnamese project: a great clam that has been under discussion for more than four years...
...People actually laughed at statements made at Communist rallies...
...The matter is much too embarrassing to serve for entertainment...
...To make sure that no reader doubts to what extent they have based their stories on fact, Lederer and Burdick conclude their book with a fifteen-page "factual epilogue...
...Its demerits might have appealed to an even larger public of doubtful literary taste (remember Peyton Place or Forever Amber), in which case The Ugly American, once it had somehow gained a foothold among the bestsellers of 1958, might well have sold half a million copies and disgraced the bestseller lists for more months than most books in America are remembered...
...I am not even ready to decide whether the accusations that have been raised against both the American and the local administrators of our aid projects in Laos are as well-founded as the multiplicity of reports leads one to believe.25 Some recent measures against waste and corruption indicate that they were at least partly based on fact...
...Three weeks after the arrival of Vinich," The Communist Farmer (now appearing almost daily) "advertised that on June 10, at 2:00 p.m., there would be a radio broadcast of great importance...
...What they are doing is much worse...
...But the critics who say that this project should never have been started stand on fairly solid ground...
...Take for instance what American aid has done for Thailand's fishing industry...
...13 A contemporary political novel about the French Foreign Service is Les Ambassades, by Roger Peyrefitte...
...Although most of our present shortcomings in diplomacy are rooted in our history and culture, there will always be merit in criticizing the people and methods our government employs in order to implement our foreign policy...
...Here we have an example of the kind of problem our foreign policy faces all over Southeast Asia, problems whose causes cannot possibly be reduced to a lack of American diplomatic skills...
...That the French lost in Indochina for political reasons is a fact of which Lederer and Burdick must be as fully aware as they undoubtedly are of the real causes underlying Manila's present difficulties with Washington...
...Others might think that Communism was the result of class conflict, of long-range economic change or political fanaticism," but Finian knew better, and Finian decided "to meet the test" (which meant to fight Communism in Asia), "even if he had to do it alone...
...From another country, Sarkhan gets all the "facts" that illustrate how anti-Americanism is fostered by the inefficiency of our aid officials and by the wrong kind of American aid...
...I am sure it never entered the authors' heads how much more logical it would have been for the Burmese of their story to show distrust for this presumptuous white man who set himself up as a native organizer, judge of Burmese character, and local political chief...
...The reader who has heard that we are now supporting the construction of a costly highway in Thailand only for military reasons should be glad to learn that this particular project can be justified very well on purely economic grounds...
...This giant of conceit regards all the other members of his delegation as "just average...
...another is Foreign Aid Reexamined, A Critical Appraisal, edited by James W. Wiggins and Helmut Schoeck, Public Affairs Press, Washington, D.C., 1958...
...Thereafter "the Communist press was printing almost nothing except replies to The Communist Farmer...
...What disrespect for the intelligence of Asian leaders and American aid officials one single such sentence reveals...
...I cannot but urge the reader to impress upon his mind the full meaning of these two sentences...
...His name was Vinich...
...They exploit this advantage with great zest, as if to underline how much their political imagination depends on being unrestrained by facts...
...I believe the people who praise The Ugly American to be in error not on a matter of small importance, but rather on a subject more serious than any I can think of as a theme for a great American debate...
...292328 of the Ellender report for the years 1954-56, at least fifty must be called small by whatever standard one chooses to apply.21 Neither the improvement of chickens nor the raising and marketing of fish is miss 20 The Reporter, September 19, 1957...
...A political activist who condemns hi aself for his failures and berates his own lack of zeal may not deser` to be imitated, but he can always expect, even from political opp ^nents, some degree of esteem...
...An example of how a novel can increase our understanding of contemporary history and politics is Joseph Conrad's Nostromo.13 The country it describes goes through a painful process of social and political transformation...
...Because I believe Chester Bowles was a splendid American ambassador to India, I hesitate to endorse The Ugly American's fierce condemnation of political appointments to diplomatic posts...
...What we achieve on this vital diplomatic front will primarily depend on the degree of enlightenment that the makers of our our foreign policy possess, and whether Congress is capable of a positive attitude toward the question of aid to India...
...This ambiguous attitude seems to justify the many people who praise the book without having read it, leading them to believe that The Ugly American has unveiled the scandal of American political negligence and ineptitude in Southeast Asia, and supporting their conviction that no criticism can be too harsh for the evils Lederer and Burdick have chosen to attack...
...The result is a slow but steady increase in the output of most local crops, above all rice, but also of vegetables, fruits, coffee and tea...
...I can think of no better example to illustrate what I mean by the American desire to find simple explanations for complicated political facts...
...One of the first Soviet- financed projects, incidentally, was a modern asphalt road through the capital of Afghanistan...
...The parts of Vietnam where American aid goes only into very small projects are the so-called Center provinces...
...it -can also not be disputed that we must incessantly strive to improve the ways of using the money we are spending on foreign aid...
...The Indochina war thus provides Lederer and Burdick with just one more opportunity to expound their thesis that our success in foreign policy depends chiefly on knowledge and skills, on "tricks" and "wiles," and on learning our enemy's "secrets...
...During the next four years India's annual steel demand will rise from the present level of three million tons to six million tons...
...The Senator from Louisiana has in my opinion made numerous errors of judgment, but to claim that our aid officials succeeded in reducing his critical ardor is like saying that the late Senator Joseph McCarthy deplored our preoccupation with Communist infiltrators and spies...
...Fiction goes beyond facts by adding to or extracting from them truths which no mere reporting of facts can reveal...
...Neither the premises nor the data of Senator Ellender's report, let alone those of Lederer and Burdick, are adequate for a serious discussion of this complex subject...
...After a number of pleasant but sleepless nights, and having lost his power of concentration, Captain Boning was caught napping and failed to give the required simple answer to a silly question asked by one of the unpredictable Indians: Was it safe for them to store these weapons in peace time...
...If the causes of our political failures abroad were as clear-cut and as plainly reducible to personal imperfection, it would indeed be easy to solve all the problems by which our diplomacy is plagued...
...Even if every single ugly detail of the Sarkhanese stories had actually occurred in one or the other of the many Asian countries, this composite picture of American official stupidity and misbehavior would still be untrue—a piece of fiction for which there exists no model in the world of fact...
...Whoever is convinced that The Ugly American was written throughout in good faith is forced by this statement to draw the following conclusion: Lederer and Burdick really believe that the facts they collected in various and vastly different countries retain their validity outside the context of reality in which they were produced and that a political fact thus isolated can still have a meaning or remain useful for conveying a particular truth...
...I might add that the essay can be read as an example of a genre which in America has been inadequately cultivated: the criticism of mass culture in the field of politics...
...At this point, I believe it to be more useful to say a few words about the respective merits of small and big projects in regard to Vietnam...
...Through these construction projects, civilian building skills are developed and substantial contributions are being made to the economic development of the area where troops are stationed...
...Surely, there must be many people who after reading this book will be tempted, by curiosity or from disbelief, to undertake a closer study of this intricate subject...
...All that was needed was to let the public know that that was what The Ugly American supplied...
...How then did The Ugly American make the bestseller lists at all and subsequently manage to occupy for months a most advantageous position...
...I admit there is nothing wrong with advising Americans who want to fight Communism in Southeast Asia to flee the cities and "work with the people in the villages," as a popular saying among critics of foreign aid now goes...
...Neither these shortcomings nor the fact that there is a general awareness of them can be denied...
...If this were not true, the so-called Marshall Plan for Europe and our ongoing programs of military and economic aid to some fifty non-Communist countries could never have overcome the opposition of a Congress that reacts to the necessity of appropriating the required money like a neurotic obsessed by starvation fears...
...Much of the praise for The Ugly American was of an ambiguous nature...
...12 The Reporter, October 16, 1958...
...by Harlan Cleveland and Gerard J. Mangone, Syracuse University Press...
...this complex question is related to fundamental concepts of American economic and political thinking, and to deal with it properly requires that we find out whether some of these concepts are not an obstacle to an effective policy of foreign aid...
...It is probably a good idea for us (as Vice President Nixon said long ago after he returned from a trip to Southeast Asia) to reduce the number of gatherings intended to foster political harmony through social drinking...
...he reproaches the authors for having "indulged freely in oversimplification, often to the point of absurdity...
...V What is true of Lederer's and Burdick's facts is, alas, also true of their figures...
...IV These evils have a wide range, and if The Ugly American makes little distinction between the trivial and the tragic, this should not serve as an excuse to belittle the painful mistakes and serious offenses of which our foreign services are guilty...
...Unlike American generals, who are evidently more addicted to writing than to reading books, French generals have always been known for their preoccupation with theories of warfare...
...A Soviet expert said it was equipped with the latest machines and 'ranked with the most modern engineering works in the world.'" There is no doubt that these efforts are made in a spirit of competition with American aid to South Vietnam...
...4 Raymond Moley, in Newsweek, December 1, 1958...
...India does need "big projects," and wants them not as a "means to power and wealth" for a few "local politicians," as Lederer and Burdick say (again without being specific as to the country or the actual projects they have in mind...
...Success against them depends on the nature of our political aims, on whether we practice, in concrete instances, the high principles we are in the habit of preaching, on whether the tasks with which our diplomats are charged confirm that American foreign policy aims at a world of freedom, justice, and economic progress for all...
...if they have chosen to disregard it, this can only be because such a fact does not fit into their peculiar scheme of building up proof for their accusations against American foreign aid...
...Yet, during the struggle in Indochina the authors could find no American (or French) military or civilian official who had read...
...Foreign aid has quite obviously failed to achieve what people expected, and has in many instances justified the criticisms that have accumulated against it during the years...
...I shall use them as one final proof for my statement that Lederer's and Burdick's political reasoning is of the same quality as their facts and figures...
...But other things never are equal...
...Lenin said that...
...Although Lederer's and Burdick's description of Finian's character and knowledge had already made me doubt their ability to create an American who makes political sense and is a tolerable human being, I was still quite unprepared for the monstrous snob Finian turns out to be as soon as his story gets under way...
...This, we are told in all seriousness by Lederer and Burdick, Asch had almost accomplished, when history in the making was brutally arrested by a captain of the U.S...
...The entire program is being reexamined, in a mood which leaves no doubt that most people are disappointed in its results...
...There is also an early kind of "antiAmericanism," which no trick of political sophistry could possibly attribute to American government aid...
...However, the accusations of these authors all have a global ring...
...He is now on his way to Sarkhan (the country invented by Lederer and Burdick as fictional background for most of their other stories), and hopes that the food there will not make him too sick...
...Much as I would like to be among the first to criticize our foreign policy-makers and the performance of our officials abroad, I have no taste for the recurrent manifestations of American patriotic masochism of which Lederer and Burdick are our latest examples...
...How Lederer and Burdick make Finian actually save a northern province of Burma from Communism I shall describe later—partly from an urge to remove the tag of political imbecility that The Ugly American has put on American Catholic priests working in the Far East...
...had not been convinced that a popular treatment of the issues of foreign aid would find a large and receptive audience...
...This hardly justifies Lederer's and Burdick's statement (unsubstantiated like all others) that "we pay for huge highways through jungles in Asian lands where there is no transport except by bicycle and on foot...
...In clear political language, this would have meant no less than a break with "neutralism" in favor of an open alignment with the West...
...Aid to India—How Much is Enough...
...Thirty-one different projects were undertaken to assist India in attaining the object of the plan—to produce more food for her hungry millions—not one being either a highway or a dam...
...Then there are those for whom an American foreign policy or aid program is meaningless if it is not inspired by moralistic considerations, usually of a kind that history has long proven to be inapplicable to the realities of international politics...
...It is troubled by a series of violent internal upheavals which reveal many of the ugliest features of political violence, which we have become accustomed to regard as Fascist or Communist inventions...
...Nearly all of the construction mentioned above will have been completed by mid-1959...
...Without accepting Mao's ideology, they were deeply impressed by his methods of infiltrating civilian populations...
...But do these efforts to save an ill-conceived project justify the many critics who try again and again to put the blame for all that is wrong with the Helmand Valley on American aid...
...It has kept the economy going...
...Operations Mission to Vietnam, I shall quote Barrows on one of the big projects he was able to realize, thanks to sufficient American aid and sustained Vietnamese enthusiasm...
...Anyone unfamiliar with this Senator's record of opposition to the larger part of American overseas operations needs only to read the Introductory Note to this document (where the Senator speaks of "the utter waste inherent in this program") to be assured that Ellender cannot possibly be the model for Jonathan Brown, the Senator whom Lederer and Burdick invented to show that even our sharpest Congressional investigators are fooled by our officials abroad...
...Advertising was initially by no means powerful enough to secure for The Ugly American the bestseller's privilege of unpaid promotion...
...Instead of sharpening our awareness of the specifically political difficulties we are facing in Asia, Lederer and Burdick feed the pernicious conviction that our foreign policy problems are essentially problems of technical proficiency and individual devotion, implying that a successful solution of these problems depends entirely on us...
...furthermore, the book purports to be written in order to give "thinking Americans" a sharper view of the entire problem of American policy in Asia, no part of which is greater than that allotted to our diplomats and officials concerned with India...
...And Toki had been sent by Finian into the Communist apparatus as a spy...
...Almost every kind of small project demanded by Lederer and Burdick has been introduced by our aid officials and technicians into Laos, at such low cost that even the Senator from Louisiana fails in his efforts to find fault with most projects in operation during 1956...
...They meant their present to be a call to political action...
...It also shows that the granting of a loan (for which Soviet bloc countries usually need a few weeks or sometimes only a few days) can take Washington a year or even longer...
...They approached their subject in a style and manner that sacrifice all claim to art to their pretension of factually accurate reproduction of reality, in a work of fiction admittedly based on invented names, places, and events...
...It will often be necessary for these Americans to deprive themselves of their germ-free meals and eat the local foods...
...And they are almost without exception projects of the kind that prove that our aid officials did not have to read The Ugly American to devote some effort and spend some money on the improvement of chickens, the raising of better pigs, the development of improved seeds, and the spreading of knowledge about commercial fishing...
...As an active figure in the International Rescue Committee, he has worked hard to help political refugees, both in Asia and Europe...
...I naturally expect no one who admired the "factual accuracy" of The Ugly American to accept this statement without the documentary evidence that Lederer and Burdick neglected to supply, and I wish I could arouse in everyone who reads this book a desire to examine 16 One is The Great Give-away, by Eugene W. Castle, Regnery, 1957...
...As part of this advertisement, the publishers (Norton & Co...
...It is an in temperate attack on foreign aid...
...It has produced concrete results in a comparatively short time...
...With such moral inspiration, the ultimate aim of our foreign policy must naturally go far beyond the mere saving of "democracy" in Lebanon or Guatemala, or of what ought to be "saved" in the Far East...
...Ever since 1955, the bulk of Sino-Soviet aid to North Vietnam went into railways, highways, irrigation systems, harbors, river transportation and industry, to such an extent that a well-known European observer predicted two years ago what the outcome of the race between Communist and American aid for Vietnam would be: "No matter what unknown price North Vietnam is paying or will have to pay for that assistance, one thing seems obvious: within a few years, at the present pace, a semi-industrialized North Vietnam will emerge beside an agricultural South.22 The same author reports that the total in aid promised to North Vietnam in 1955 was 2 billion dollars...
...And I am also ready to support some measure of military aid to this strategically important country of only two million people, even if it were only because replacement of an American-financed Laotian army with one single American division, provided we could station it in Laos, would cost at least three times the amount of our present aid to Laos...
...It could, and probably did, teach them what made Communist guerrilla tactics successful, but it could not, and certainly did not, provide them with the means of making these tactics ineffective...
...parties interested in securing for it "the largest possible audience of thinking Americans," as the book's jacket says...
...Far from being a country where "the Russians will win without firing a shot," Vietnam, on the contrary, is the first country in Asia where the West, by replacing imperialism with policies of aid, has stopped the "Russians" without firing a shot...
...16 All we get as evidence that billions are spent on the wrong kind of projects is another expression of opinion...
...Broad as they are," says Hugo Jaeckel in his excellent review in The New Leader, "the targets chosen are valid ones and the anger expended in hitting them seems sincere...
...And would Mao Tse-tung have published his "plans" and instructions for warfare in Asia if there had been danger that their study by the French might have reduced the effectiveness of Communist military tactics in Indochina...
...or was there any danger that they might explode in their faces...
...This unusual promotion of a "novel" was undertaken without in the least falsifying the true and original intentions of its two authors...
...But Egypt lies outside the territory with which The Ugly American is primarily concerned, and I mentioned it only to prepare the reader for a later portion of my essay, in which I shall try to show that Lederer's and Burdick's political thinking is about equal to the reliability of their facts...
...This is the story of Father Finian, the Catholic priest who, after identifying Communism with "the face of the devil" felt called upon to fight it in Burma with weapons of his own invention, modestly resolved to defeat Communism "even if he had to do it alone...
...286-328 for Vietnam, pp...
...A truly fundamental contradiction appears if we look closely at their claim that their book is "the rendering of fact into fiction" and then compare this claim with their astonishing admission that not only are the places they describe invented but also the events...
...10 Robert Trumbull, in The New York Times, Book Review, October 5, 1958...
...Because Lederer and Burdick, in their Factual Epilogue, try to lean on the authority of Leland Barrows, the former Director of the U.S...
...It is certainly valuable to show to a large American audience what damage is constantly being done by our inability to understand alien cultures, our unwillingness to learn foreign languages, and by the "social incest" practiced behind the "sanitary curtain" that our germ-conscious representatives have put up in too many countries between themselves and the local populations...
...But from The Ugly American's premises, not even our aid to Laos can be attacked with any hope of convincing an audience not basically hostile to •foreign aid...
...53-87 for Indonesia...
...These 2,000 officials and technicians—a far cry from the "horde" of 1,500,000 (which is really the estimated yearly figure of Americans going abroad as tourists)—are made responsible by The Ugly American for the meager results of our aid efforts, and are denounced in advance as the chief culprits in the event of any future Communist victory in Southeast Asia...
...BECAUSE I PLAN to treat the vital problem of Western aid to India in another context, I shall limit myself at this point to a few bare but essential facts...
...Let readers who want to know "facts" start out with the Report on Overseas Operations of the United States Government submitted to the Senate by the Hon...
...Consequently, the story contains no hint that most Burmese leaders have become acquainted with the evils of Communism not so much through their diligent study of Marx and Engels (the method recommended for Americans by Lederer and Burdick), but rather because Communist activity threatened their lives as well as their political aspirations...
...Our Indian technical assistance program, for which a better name would be American-Indian technical cooperation, started in 1952...
...II It seems, at least from time to time, that the American reading public is by no means as rigidly indifferent to politics as the many disappointed agitators, unsupported reformers and unsaleable authors perennially maintain...
...To reduce our aid by 50 per cent of the current year and discontinue the entire program in three years, as a newly formed "Citizens Foreign Aid Committee" demands, would destroy all chances for the development of a constructive American policy...
...In this respect, the story of Tom Knox is typical for the entire book: Neither the events chosen by Lederer and Burdick to illustrate their points nor the facts that are supposed to prove them are of much validity for a description of conditions as they exist today...
...The essay that follows was submitted by Joseph Buttinger as a contribution to the understanding of a crucial problem: how can effective aid be given to the underdeveloped countries so as to raise their standards of living, help them move toward political freedom and check the influence of Communism...
...From one country, they borrow Ambassador Sears who talks like Salomon Asch and like Asch lacks "professional training," but unlike Asch is a true master of diplomatic misconduct and political bungling...
...It has kept a strong and reasonably competent anti-Communist government in power, and ended the previous anarchy...
...18 International Cooperation Administration Replies to Criticisms of the Foreign Aid Program, p. 23, U.S...
...When, as a result of Finian's work, the Communist Party in northern Burma became actually "antic," the old leaders were replaced...
...Or are we supposed to believe that the anti-Communist Burmese officials regarded Finian's attempt to beat their Communist foes as illegal...
...We built 4,000 small private fishponds and an adequate number of fish hatcheries...
...I know, of course, as well as the reader that these figures and verifications of projects prove nothing one way or another about the quality and relevancy of our various programs of aid to Laos, but I must insist that they effectively destroy the bases from which Lederer and Burdick attack American foreign aid...
...7 The Ugly American, Factual Epilogue, pp...
...The reader can solve it, however, by asking himself what chance of success Asch would have had in the world of fact...
...I am not speaking of minor fictional details, as for instance the fact that there never was a conference in Hongkong where we tried to persuade the "neutralist" countries of Asia to store American thermonuclear weapons, or that no "tough and competent" Jewish union "negotiator" ever headed an American diplomatic delegation at an international meeting devoted to military affairs...
...Lederer and Burdick must have been strongly aware of the need that exists for a book to castigate the shortcomings, sins of omission and blunders that in the eyes of Asia falsify America's real political will...
...The picture they paint of our diplomatic and foreign aid personnel in Southeast Asia is not only unjust —reason enough to reject it...
...Seen from this position of gallant American conceit, no action is worthwhile, no expense defensible and all concern misplaced unless the result of our efforts is that someone or something is being "saved...
...I shall not discuss here the question whether American aid, as some critics maintain, should have done more to give South Vietnam some of the industries she undoubtedly must get sooner or later, regardless of whether North Vietnam is industrialized quickly or slowly...
...Even as critical an observer of American aid and Vietnamese politics as the English journalist David Hotham cannot but use words of praise in listing what American aid has done for Vietnam, in an article criticizing this aid...
...You all know the miracle of Cai San, where in a little more than six months 43,000 refugees have been resettled in more than 8,000 newly built houses on 200 kilometers of newly dug canals, where despite the handicap of early rains, the first year's crop of 16,000 hectares of rice is growing...
...but the new ones were also quickly purged "and their replacements were in turn removed...
...We should do this even if we reject the notion that a ritual regarded as diplomatic virtue if performed by the Russians with vodka becomes diplomatic vice if Americans perform it with whiskey and gin...
...A frank and detailed blueprint for accession to power and subsequent conquest has not helped us in the case of Hitler, nor is it now helping us in the case of Nasser...
...Ever since we lost our dream of a stable peace and our belief in certain prosperity for all mankind in the "One World" of our pre-Potsdam aspirations, American political thinking in regard to the world, though clouded by weariness and fear, has been characterized by an intensity and seriousness of which one would only wish that it were matched by an equal degree of understanding...
...Yet the only effective remedy, according to the Lederer and Burdick school of political thinking, would be the removal of an ambassador who evidently must be inefficient, ignorant and untrained, to have permitted such conditions to develop...
...I shall not avoid this obligation, but first I would like to show that promotion by people who could afford to buy more than one copy was not the only reason for its surprising success and for its becoming an "affair of state...
...29 India's need for the remaining two years of her second Five-Year Plan is a minimum of one billion dollars in longterm loans from the United States...
...In their opinion, a simple case of "avoidable ignorance" is the cause of the West's disastrous defeat in Indochina...
...They may also ignore the many authors, both American and Asian, who believe that big projects like dams, highways, and irrigation systems are more important as a "prerequisite to industrialization and economic independence for Asia" than the improvement of chicken breeding and the sanitary use of night-soil...
...The facts of this book are all of the kind one gathers in travel and conversations...
...We think that Joseph Buttinger's polemic should therefore be of interest even to those who have little interest in The Ugly American itself, since it is the kind of polemic that raises general issues of far greater consequence than the errors, misinformation and glibness that it attacks...
...To "save the world" exceeds by far the capability of any one power, no matter how easy it may already be for several to destroy the world...
...3 Saturday Review, October 4, 1958...
...It took place, and the voice of Vinich was heard by the entire peasant population of the province of Anthkata (who, unlike other Burmese peasants, seem to possess radios...
...To begin with Thailand, the reader with enough patience will find that page 420 lists, under eight headings, a total of seventy-eight projects...
...How reassuring an aspect even our greatest political difficulties in Asia would suddenly take on...
...he condescends to call one "useful in spots," but makes up for it by describing another as being "not worth a damn," and a third as a "stupid jerk...
...Although it was bloody and costly in men and materiel, the Indochina war was primarily a political struggle...
...The Communist party, although in control in North Vietnam, has not become a "strong contender for power" in the South, but has rather lost all hope of a victory which five years ago not even our most consistent optimists had the courage to doubt...
...He was tall, wiry, hard-faced, a veteran of purges, conspiracies, plots, and counterplots...
...As in every field of human endeavor, the men and women who administer and execute our programs of foreign aid are of all kinds: some poor, some adequate, and some as excellent as training, devotion and years of experience have made many of our officials in all branches of public service...
...It was obviously not written in order to add to our theoretical understanding of these problems, but rather to influence practical politics as directly as this can be done by a book...
...Abandoned land is recultivated, small canals and other irrigation works are repaired, roads are built between villages and towns, and crops as well as livestock are improved by the simple and inexpensive means of proper technical assistance...
...I am aware that this essay contains little that is critical of either policy or administration...
...Here is his chief trick: In order both to deceive the Communists and to reach the Communist-influenced peasant masses, Finian calls his anti-Communist paper The Communist Farmer...
...We know that the Republic of Costaguana is no real country but a product of Conrad's imagination, yet no one who reads this novel can fail to perceive its political insight and fidelity to significant detail...
...they falsify vital aspects of reality through omission...
...5 ibid...
...As recently as February 4, 1959, a Russian-built steel mill with a capacity of 1,000,000 tons a year costing an estimated $275,000,000, was officially opened in India...
...When everything is taken into account—the political and spiritual victory represented by the sacrifice the refugees made in moving into Free Vietnam, the great resource of human skill they represent, and the idle and un productive land they can with appropriate assistance make fruitful— I can think of no better way to have used American aid for the economic development of this country than in support and resettlement of refugees...
...It has largely prevented inflation...
...Buttinger has occupied himself with a variety of political and intellectual tasks...
...This can be done only through many big projects...
...It is written in a style in which not even a contemporary Dostoevsky could tell us anything about a person's inner life...
...Finian certainly takes no notice of the fact that the Burmese themselves have waged their own desperate and quite bloody war against Communism ever since the Communists started their armed insurrection in March I948...
...American foreign policy in this historical period will therefore never seem even modestly successful to Americans and will remain the major source of American political despair if what we expect it to achieve continues to be the unattainable goal of a world for whose problems we can provide unfailing solutions and from which the night mare of nuclear war has been lifted for good...
...This is too immense and too complicated a problem of contemporary political history to be treated briefly or lightly, and if some of the following remarks sound frivolous and farcical, I must remind the reader that I am merely reporting what Lederer and Burdick tell us is the main lesson of the Indochina war...
...This was cunning," Lederer and Burdick say in praise of their own ingenuity, apparently quite unaware of the fact that no Communist paper for farmers ever was, nor is likely ever to be called anything but The Democratic Farmer...
...If income taxes were not raised, it is because they are already now considerably higher than in the United States...
...Every year brings an increase in the number of books, articles, and reports over the air, the writers of which all seem to have learned that one can serve the old tenets of isolationism to the American public only at the risk of being considered a crank...
...But Lederer and Burdick are obviously convinced that a superior comprehension of the nature of Communism is just another item in the arsenal of America's much envied wealth, and that in this respect too the peoples of Southeast Asia must be regarded as "underdeveloped...
...But neither the publishers nor Morris Ernst tells us who paid for the 98 copies that went to the Senate, nor how many of the people who signed this particular recommendation of The Ugly American have actually read the book...
...It is difficult to prove that it is as a result of this costly and doubtful venture that Afghanistan has turned toward Russia and become one of the largest recipients of Soviet aid...
...I11 In view of this generally recognized national mood, no ex ceptional perspicacy was required on the part of the publishers (and promoters) of The Ugly American to realize that luck had presented them with a "bombshell of a book...
...Something in this apparently innocent phrase disturbed me from the beginning...
...24 Indonesia received an Export-Import Bank loan of $100 million in 1950...
...The correct figure of American civilians working for our government abroad is 40,000...
...To a large extent, the essay consists of a sustained polemic against the "novel," The Ugly American, a book, says Joseph Buttinger, which has been influential far beyond its merits and which, by advancing inaccurate, simplistic and sensationalistic criticisms of foreign aid to Asia, manages to do several harmful things simultaneously: it heartens those neo-isolationists who use it to propose an abandonment of aid to the Asian countries, it obscures the delicate complexities of the problem through coarse fictionalizing, and it stands in the way of the more serious and basic criticisms to which American aid should be subjected...
...The three costliest among these are malaria control, which has already reached two thirds of the population, the construction of small hospitals in the 71 provinces, and crop improvement...
...Let no one believe that this refers to such matters as the vehemence with which Lederer and Burdick condemn our officials abroad for mixing the hardships of diplomacy with the pleasures of cocktails, or for trusting their native employees to faithfully translate what is locally written...
...Also, the subcontinent of India lies not within the region of Southeast Asia proper, with which The Ugly American is primarily concerned...
...A more balanced criticism of our aid program to Laos is Franklin J. Leerburger's article "Laos: Case Study of U.S...
...Salomon Asch was invented only for the purpose of showing that even a superman must fail if he has to work with people who are "not worth a damn," and to meet this crude product of Lederer's and Burdick's imagination is only our just reward for insisting on being "entertained" even while we are trying to find out how to save the world...
...As to contradictory statements, let me add one last example, which the reader will find in a reference to Egypt, a country Lederer and Burdick mention in the Factual Epilogue (together with Indonesia and Laos) as one where Communism is gaining in strength because we practice the wrong kind of aid...
...that they are unwilling to learn, uninterested in their work, prejudiced against the local people, concerned chiefly with personal comfort, opposed to working outside the big cities, disinclined to read books, and keen only to get to their frequent gatherings for the consumption of hard liquor—whereupon they are likely to discuss political secrets in front of the Communist spies they stupidly employ...
...There, more than in any other Asian country, a certain number of dams, highways, vast and small irrigation systems as well as large industries are indispensable conditions for any significant step toward an improvement in the life of the people...
...For these reasons, I would like to compare the Sino-Soviet aid program for North Vietnam with our aid to the South, apart from the question to what extent the aid policy of the Soviet bloc is likely to influence the future of our own programs of foreign aid...
...The list of troubles we have in this hybrid country could be lengthened—no American, for instance, speaks Sarkhanese—but there is no need to go into further details...
...To provide a much-needed source of water supply for the rapidly growing capital was one of the reasons why our aid officials proposed and why the Iranians themselves are now proceeding with this project...
...John W. Marland, in The Art of Overseasmanship, ed...
...But all of this was eclipsed by the gratifyingly low sum of $6,000 for Lederer's and Burdick's pet project, the improvement of chickens...
...18 The other "big" projects in Thailand (all except one—malaria control— also costing less than two million dollars each) are in the fields of education (teacher training, technical and medical education), health, sanitation and agriculture...
...Lederer and Burdick even exclude the possibility that French and American officials familiar with Mao's works might have existed although they could not find them...
...exaggeration is rife," he continues, and "most of the characters are caricatures and grotesque 9 New York Herald Tribune, Book Review, October 5, 1958...
...and even if they were not, Lederer's and Burdick's loose phrase about "huge highways through jungles" would still make no sense...
...First he tells us that "the incidents recounted sound palpably contrived despite their advertised origin in fact...
...An example of a peculiar kind of thrusting is the public history of The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick...
...They are easier to check, and although wrong figures are rather common in print, their degree of reliability permits one to draw some conclusion about a book's accuracy in other respects...
...I meet only the later kind, most of whom expected The Ugly American to free them from their uncertainty in regard to the facts and to help them decide what ought to be done about foreign aid...
...As India is rich in iron ore and coal, and certainly has no lack of manpower, it was a "businesslike" decision of her leaders to double the country's steel production instead of keeping her new industry dependent on an annual steel import of three million tons...
...But they deserve to be singled out (together with the comments on them in the Factual Epilogue), because they serve Lederer and Burdick to explain what they consider to be the lesson of the Indochina war...
...But unless we fulfill two conditions, both of greater importance than more foreign languages and fewer diplomatic cocktails (about which there is really no quarrel), we shall be as unsuccessful in the future as Lederer and Burdick say we have been in the past...
...After having grown to almost irresistible strength under the colonial regime, Vietnamese Communism suffered a most disastrous defeat between 1954 and 1956, the first inflicted by its enemies on Communism in Asia with entirely political weapons...
...Lederer and Burdick try to explain why the great Asch, after finding out that the requested information was not classified, failed to save the situation: the Asian delegates were annoyed and too excited to listen to reason, and "Asch knew when he was licked...
...They even give us a list of the projects they regard as most helpful, and in support of their views they also make reference to "native economists" from whom they claim to have gathered their information, but again without mentioning so much as a single name, country, book, paper or other verifiable source...
...The American aid program in South Vietnam," he writes, "has dealt with amazing, indeed unique, efficiency with the refugees...
...nor can they possibly go along with Lederer and Burdick, who say no less than that India is "neutral" because some "son of a bitch" on our Asian diplomatic front has made a mess of his job...
...But if the reviews are a reliable indication, the majority of the people who read The Ugly American must have a high opinion, if not of the literary value, at least of the political usefulness of this book...
...Unfortunately, this attitude is not uncommon among many wellmeaning and devoted Americans in Asia, and it is one that no rhetoric of humility can disguise for very long...
...In spite of an apparent humility in discussing his plans with the eight Burmese he has recruited, Finian is really more righteous in judging and leading the Burmese people than any of the biblical prophets who tried to lead, and spent their lives condemning the Jews...
...The mere fact that American engineers built the dams and that the ExportImport Bank furnished some of the money to continue the work does not brand the project as one undertaken by our government...
...Could it be that Lederer and Burdick really took a closer look at these two cases and then decided that they do not support their attack on the American aid program...
...But this task could have been carried out only with a work of the highest historical veracity and the profoundest political insight...
...This sounds more like the French...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
